SkillsTown has launched the world’s first online Corporate MBE (cMBE), and it’s going to shake up the world of professional learning as we know it.
SkillsTown is the largest professional learning platform in the Netherlands. It’s been adapted for the local market, giving all employees of an organisation access to over one hundred online learning modules, anytime, anywhere.
Now, SkillsTown SA has partnered with the South African Business School’s FutureFit Academy, to enable management teams to participate in a professional cMBE programme at the fraction of the cost of a typical MBA, making learning accessible to all.
Staying relevant in an ever-changing world
The FutureFit Academy (FFA) is a centre of excellence in SA Business School, a SETA accredited training provider specialising in helping individuals, teams, leaders and organisations equip themselves for changes in the world of work.
Says Kevin Hardy, Managing Director at SkillsTown SA: “We are living in an era of uncertainty, with new ways of working, innovative technologies and new business models emerging on an almost daily basis. Education risks being left behind, so we’re proud to be offering a unique cMBE programme with FutureFit that meets the needs of corporates, by providing their staff with critical business skills to adapt and add value in today’s challenging and unpredictable world.”
Disrupting the professional learning landscape
The cMBE is made up of eight knowledge blocks that include Management and Leadership, Strategy, Innovation, Organisation, Human Resources Management, Sales and Marketing, and Finance. With the FutureFit partnership, customers also have the option to complement this offering with an additional seven modules that focus specifically on critical future-world-of-work skills, such as Design Thinking, Tolerance of Ambiguity, Adaptability and Change Resiliency.
Companies can also claim back any SkillsTown or FutureFit spend against the Skills Development matrix of the B-BBEE scorecard.
According to Dr Eric Albertini, executive at the FutureFit Academy, the partnership combines first world technology and expert knowledge to give employees an affordable and relevant cMBE qualification, while delivering on an essential local business requirement for companies – that of Skills Development.
“Our collaboration is a natural fit encompassing the three pillars of knowing, doing and being,” he adds. “SkillsTown offers the core learning content of the cMBE – the theory or the knowing, as well as what to do with it and how to practically apply it – the doing. FutureFit on the other hand, focuses on the behavioural elements of learning, or the being. The current or traditional ways of organising work and learning have been dramatically redefined by the pandemic. So too have the requirements of skills and mindsets. It is time to reimagine and reboot our approaches to organisational learning from the models, to delivery and technology. This partnership provides an innovative approach to executive education to provide learning solutions with impact for people and business.”
The cMBE is aimed at an NQF Level 6 and typically takes just eight months to complete. Using a blended learning approach with support from specialised business coaches, project teams are encouraged to learn together and from each other – typically how management teams operate in their day-to-day working environment.
A thesis does not form part of the cMBE offering. Instead, employees immediately start working on business cases within and relevant to their company. This means that from day one, the cMBE ensures that all employees, as well as the organisation itself, performs better.
Discover the opportunities for your organisation
We would love to tell you all about how our cMBE programme can provide your employees with the critical business skills to adapt to the continuously changing world around them.
