The benefits and impact

of a degree in Business Administration

Studying business administration opens the door to countless opportunities by helping you develop the necessary skills for a plethora of career paths.

A degree in business administration equips you with a versatile skill set essential in virtually every industry. Graduates are able to find jobs as specialists and managers in a variety of fields such as Sales, Marketing, Supply chain, human resources and accounting.

Aside from the scientific basis a bachelor’s degree provides, a business degree can help cultivate the following skills:

The recent pandemic has shown us that the world is in rising need of competent business leaders that are able to navigate an increasingly complex landscape. Leaders today are facing more challenges, but also more opportunities that are enabled by an ever expanding technological frontier. As a result, firms are constantly evaluating new technological trends aiming to identify emerging technologies and assess their effect on certain industries or even the global market.

However, it is not self-evident that simply accumulating knowledge will translate into practical insights. It is important to nurture the ability to identify, as well as seize opportunities when encountered with them. Tony Mayo, a prominent Professor at Harvard Business School, talks in a Forbes article about three distinct characteristics he observed from looking at successful leaders in the 20th century. He ascribes their success to their ability to seize the opportunities they were presented with, as well as overcome the challenges they were confronted with during the industrial revolution.

He explains that those leaders who have led the industrial revolution generally fall under one of the following three roles. The Entrepreneurs who create new industries and set the contextual landscape for the new business world. The Managers who capitalize on opportunities of the current or emergent landscape and focus on growth and expansion through efficiency. And finally, Leaders, who are able to revive and reinvent dying industries overlooked and dismissed by the mainstream as mature markets.

This has raised questions about the role of business schools and how they can help tackle the permeating obstacles that face current and future corporate executives. Birkinshaw from the Financial Times newspaper suggests that business schools need to properly educate their students to face those challenges. They carry the responsibility in cultivating and shaping the leaders of the future. Simply teaching business theories is not enough, but rather they need to be applied to real world problems to generate substantive insights. Similarly, he highlights the need for taking a “problem-solving perspective” and actively taking the initiative to facilitate real change.

As a result, this further magnifies the need for business schools to teach the contextual intelligence needed to understand and compete in the current corporate landscape. By understanding the latest insights, as well as cultivating their ability to effectively seize opportunities, they become capable of leaving a positive mark on the world. Our mission at Helvetic Business School is to guide future leaders to face and overcome the problems of tomorrow.