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By Barry McCall, Irish Times

Photo: Tim Wray, Director of UCD Smurfit Executive Development: 'Very few business schools offer executive education purely with their own faculty'

Tim Wray took over as director of UCD Smurfit Executive Development last summer having spent the previous 25 years working in executive education in Britain and Ireland following a successful career in the telecoms sector. He has seen some quite profound changes in executive education during that time and believes more are on the way.

“It’s a very competitive landscape,” he says. “Very few business schools are offering executive education purely with their own faculty. Partnerships are critically important. We are leveraging partnerships with business schools around the world to add to our own capability and bring a broader perspective. We are involved in a lot of global alliances and are actively forging new partnerships to further enhance the experience of our students.”

The way courses are delivered is also changing. Increasingly, programmes are blended with a mix of classroom and remote delivery, he notes. “We still see the value of the in-person experience. It is very difficult to replicate that learning experience. It facilitates collaboration and mentoring, for example.”

There is a significant amount of online delivery as well and this has its uses, according to Wray. “If we are dealing with a dispersed workforce on one of our customised programmes a lot of the learning will be online. We enhance the experience through gamification and other methods. We bring the participants on site as well, of course.”

This article was originally published in the Irish Times on June 6, 2024. Read the full article here.