Deficit of Case Studies in Ukraine’s Schools of Business
We hear little about business education today. Many managers of Ukrainian companies believe that a good business school is a rarity, hands-on experience is far more important, and education does not guarantee the acquisition of practical skills. Still, about 40% of top executives of various Ukrainian and foreign companies polled by the CEUME, the Consortium for Enhancing Management Education in Ukraine, admitted that business education is a hallmark of employee maturity and those with this kind of education have a more systemic and constructive thinking, requiring less investment in their further on- the-job training. While these are two different things, knowledge of economics is often confused with management that deals with the practical issues of running a business. This is a new area of knowledge even in the United States, not to speak of Ukraine.
How are Ukraine’s schools of business administration doing? Amid increasing competition in this segment of the education market, new schools and training centers are beginning to mushroom, offering new master’s programs and case studies. “Increased competition has not resulted in lower tuition fees in this area and higher fees are evidence of a growing demand,” Dean of the Kiev-Mohyla School of Business Pavlo Sheremeta says. The nature of business itself has changed, resulting in new radical developments in this field. Natural resources have lost the importance they had in the past and capital, a must for starting a business in the mid-twentieth century, is no longer a guarantee of success. Today the most important resource is people: their creativity, willingness to innovate, leadership skills, quick thinking, and their ability to make the most unrealistic ideas reality. Employees showing such skills need to be found, shaped into a team, inspired for further achievement, and provided with the opportunities for further creative growth. That is why Ukrainian schools of business target themselves at developing leadership skills and exposing their students to practical experience.
Unfortunately, the curriculums of Ukrainian business schools do not reflect the realities of doing business in Ukraine. True, Ukrainian business is too young to provide for a sufficient number of situations, which can be used in training, like how to talk to tax and fire protection inspectors or to collect from deadbeats. The case study method is among the most widely used techniques in business education. It is a radical departure from the still dominant approaches to secondary and higher education in Ukraine such that students are supposed to learn the right answers instead of developing skills aimed at helping them work their own ways to such answers.
Interestingly, one of the questions included in the public opinion survey conducted by the consortium was on how different the graduates of Ukrainian and Western business schools are. While the latter are convinced that there are no limits to human achievement, the former tend to draw the line between attainable and, unattainable goals. Ukrainians also try to minimize risks in an effort to reduce their personal liabilities while their Western counterparts are not afraid of making a mistake and act more boldly. But experts agree that the graduates of Ukrainian business schools are able to work more productively in Ukraine than those with foreign degrees because they have a better knowledge of local conditions.
Currently, Ukrainian educators are involved in drawing up new training programs for specialists preparing them for careers in a free market economy. Many of these are worked out under the US- sponsored project to improve managerial education in Ukraine and implemented by the consortium. For the last three years, the consortium has cooperated with approximately forty Ukrainian universities in a bid to foster new educational ideas, technologies, and methods which can meet the needs of Ukrainian business circles and entrepreneurs. The goal of the project is to improve the business education curricula used to train a new generation of businesspeople who will be able to manage Ukrainian businesses in the transition period and in the future.
A survey run by the Ukrainian Institute of Social Research this June reveals increasing interest among Ukrainian young people to learn entrepreneurial skills. According to the survey, half of those polled (aged between 14 and 28) has thought about starting their own private businesses, with preference given to the trade and service sectors, followed by production, tourism, and information technologies. However, only one fifth of respondents are optimistic about the prospects for doing business in Ukraine. Such a high rate of pessimists might be explained by the Ukrainian system of education, which does not teach the young to find employment under the complex conditions of our transition economy. One of the ways of solving this problem could be further improvement in business education in Ukraine, with education playing a key role in transforming obsolete and ineffectual economic structures into competitive ones. The role of education is especially important in teaching economics and managerial skills because it helps create the human capital, without which no economic transformation can succeed.
