Rather than having a mid-career break to take a six-month or year-long executive education course, upskilling and reskilling is now considered a decades-long endeavour, spanning an entire working life and potentially consisting of multiple short courses. Executive education directors say successful executives are constantly looking to learn and understand more about their professional fields and how to best lead their employees.
University of Queensland Executive Education director Associate Professor Nicole Hartley says executives appreciate shorter, condensed professional development courses which might take a day or a half-day, and they might refresh their skills and knowledge four, five or six times a year to “stay abreast in different spaces”.
The number of business and management short courses on offer at Queensland University has doubled since 2022, in response to demand from executives and emerging executives seeking to upskill on specific topics. “If professionals are looking to change roles, they might bed down into longer-form courses,” Hartley says.
Social skills and the ability to work collaboratively across ecosystems are increasingly valued, she adds, and executives are looking for cutting-edge skills and capabilities and appreciate tools and frameworks they can put to work immediately.
“Executive education has in the past predominantly been leadership courses,” Hartley says. “There are a lot of different ways to approach leadership, from strategic thinking to how to lead people in teams. We’re now broadening out those skill-sets and capabilities; we’re responsive to what’s happening in the broader business market.”
Increasingly complex business landscapes require constant skills and knowledge refreshment, and Work-From-Home demands and fractious workplace relations require executives to expand and regularly renew leadership skills.
Queensland University’s business school brings in industry for up-date-industry insights, Hartley says, and runs an Expression of Interest process so researchers from across the disciplines provide immediate notifications of any industry-applicable developments.
University of NSW Dean of Lifelong Learning Professor Nick Wailes says life used to be divided into more or less discrete sections: education, work, retirement. But the world has changed, and technology has led to upheavals in industry.
“Even career structures have become a lot less linear,” he says. “Executives really need to be always learning to stay relevant and up to date.”
Australians are living longer, and few executives retire at 60 these days, adds Wailes, who is also the director of the Australian Graduate School of Management at the university. “People have lots of different careers, and you really need to have the ability to pick up new skills and capabilities to sustain your working life.”
Lengthy career breaks for study are increasingly rare, he says, noting it is unusual for an executive stop working for six months or a year to take a course and then return to the workplace.
“We still have a full-time MBA,” he adds. “It’s a year intensive study before returning to labour market. It’s a great luxury, and they learn a lot, but it’s much more common for people to be studying and learning new things while also in their roles.