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Jan 28, 2019
The Number-One Skill Employers Look for in MBAs (and How to Give Your Graduates a Leg Up)
BY Noah ZandanWe know communication is critical for a business’s operations, reputation, and bottom line. We’ve know communication takes up more of our working hours than any other activity, and we know the cost of poor communication can be devastating to an organization’s bottom line. So it was no surprise that the GMAC Corporate Recruiter Survey found communication to be the most important skill recruiters look for in new hires. In fact, four of the five top skills were communication related, including oral and written communication, listening, and presentation skills.
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Jan 07, 2019
How to Move Your Audience to Action—Every Single Time
Think about the last presentation you gave, whether it was to your employees, your investors, or your customers. What was your goal? What did you want your audience to understand at the end of your talk? More importantly, what did you want them to do as a result of listening to you?
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Jan 03, 2019
AI’s New Year’s Resolutions for Education
BY Noah ZandanEverywhere you look in the weeks leading up to and following New Year’s Eve, people are making predictions for the year to come. Economic forecasts, political projections, pop culture forecasts. You name it, we’re predicting it.
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Dec 20, 2018
Bridging the Gap Between Liberal Arts Education and Critical Job Skills
More and more in our evolving economy, we hear that employers are struggling to find applicants with the critical job skills they’re looking for (chief among them being communication), and that struggle has led to calls for higher education institutions to shift their focus from a broad liberal arts education to a more concrete, skills-based curriculum.
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Dec 04, 2018
Higher Education: Personalizing Instruction in 100+ Lecture Courses
BY Noah ZandanThink back to your college days, and imagine a lecture hall packed with hundreds of students. The professor, wearing a body mic or standing behind a lectern, looks like a spec to the people in the balcony, who take furious notes (or don’t) as she lectures. Every single day.
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Nov 21, 2018
In the Higher Ed Classroom, Finding Tech You Can Trust
BY Noah ZandanAs educational technology (“ed tech”) carves out a growing space for itself in classrooms at all levels, the proliferation of vendors and offerings has led to an understandable mistrust of the hundreds of flashy tools promising instantaneous improvements and rapid transformations in the classroom.
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Nov 07, 2018
Developing Transformational Leaders for a Changing World
BY Noah ZandanOnce upon a time, leadership was a little more standard than it is today. Would-be executives emerged from MBA programs into a corporate world in which, for the most part, they knew what to expect. Business as usual was the norm. Today, however, the status quo is anything but, with the World Economic Forum reporting on a number of factors that have led to a period of dramatic change in the world of work:
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Nov 01, 2018
Combining Classroom and Online Courses to Improve Learning
BY Noah ZandanOnline learning often gets a bad rap. As we’ve written before, the remote, automated nature of these programs can make them feel too low-touch to provide the same quality learning experience students can receive in the classroom. And often, that’s the case. When each student is simply clicking through a standardized lesson and answering a few multiple choice questions at the end, it’s no wonder the learning feels superficial.
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Oct 24, 2018
Beyond Theory: Making Room for Practice in Higher Education
BY Noah ZandanThere’s a problem plaguing corporate learning and development leaders: to put it simply, they can’t get trainings to “stick” in employees’ brains, so they struggle to achieve significant returns on investments—not to mention increases in productivity and engagement.
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Oct 18, 2018
To Give MBA Graduates a Real Advantage, Focus on Communication
BY Noah ZandanAccording to the Graduate Management Admission Council, 89 percent of employers are planning to increase the number of MBA graduates they hire, and they expect to offer those MBA grads a median starting salary of $110,000 compared to $60,000 for those with only a bachelor’s. So what’s setting those MBA grads ahead of the pack? According to the vast majority of survey respondents, communication and teamwork.