Waking up in 2050. I am a marketer.

Who knows if our world will work like this? That is, people and AI working together to help each other accomplish things. What I do know however is that unless I focus myself and my students on gaining a twenty-first century mindset, I will be doing my students a disservice. New work areas are proposed for the next 30 or more years: consider a young student now, graduating from university with a degree in business, majoring in marketing. By the time that young graduate is in her early 50’s (still young!) she may be managing a team of customer bots. Her bots will be primarily responsible for service delivery, handling customer complaints, managing the supply chain, and ensuring the sustainability metrics are exceeded.  Our now middle-aged graduate (unless the average age has reached 120 years, therefore she is still under half-way), employs artificial intelligence assistants that make Siri look slow.

We might ask ourselves, as marketing educators, what is there left for our graduates to do at work in this scenario?

I think the image says it well. Our young graduates will use their creativity. Their “right brains”. To solve intractable problems. To create experiences. To collaborate with others in creative endeavors. To create new ways of working, AND to create new jobs.

Sir Ken Robinson gives a definition of creativity as “applied imagination” in an article about how creativity matters in education (https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/40217/sir-ken-robinson-creativity-is-in-everything-especially-teaching); retrieved March 27th.

How has my practice changed? This is difficult to answer, given I have now been on a sabbatical since January 8th, 2018. I have not been teaching, I have instead been trying to produce original research. However, in the back of my mind there are thoughts and plans for helping my students unleash their creativity in our classes, for semester two.

I am choosing “21st century skills” as the theme for my marketing students, for semester two, 2018. This theme is mentioned as a core theme in the Hack Education Research (2016) created by the MindLab.

Since I am choosing 21st century skills as my change in practice, this means my work has only started. All my course materials, teaching plans, methodologies, class-room presence…and assessments will be recast to reflect the following question:

“to what extent does this session, lesson, lecture, reading, task, assessment, article, session plan…help students acquire the skills required of a 21st century marketer?”

This final post, completed at 4:47 pm on the due date for the whole assignment, represents the end of my journey through the MindLab DCL program. What to say? Have I changed? Can I sustain my “new practice?” Without falling into the black hole that so many do in tertiary, or giving up in the face of a system full of inertia?

At this stage, I do not know what the outcome will be. What I do know however is that I think about “teaching” at tertiary radically differently than when I started with MindLab. And perhaps that alone is enough.

Thanks MindLab.

 

 

 

Tika [Integrity] Pono [Respect] Aroha [Compassion] Taken from AUT Directions to 2025, “Our Values”.

“Moana” an original work in pastel by Kristin Zambucka, 1969. Bought by my Mother in Christchurch, in 1969, and given to me last year, 2017. Now hanging in our house. The artist, Kristin Zambucka, spent most of the 1960’s and ’70’s travelling around New Zealand (with a side journey around the Pacific) in search of indigenous “subjects” to draw (pastel portraits). Zambucka focused mostly on drawing women’s portraits, and at one stage tried to capture what she called “Faces from the Past: The Dignity of Maori Age”. I have a large, and rare, book full of these portraits.

Looking at this work now it seems quaint and almost inappropriate that an artist sought to capture the likenesses of “the other” before they disappeared. My sister, an anthropologist, says that artists doing what Zambucka has done was common 40 to 50 years ago, and was the white world’s attempt to capture “the native world”, because of the differences between the cultures.

As I previously wrote, my Posts for the last MindLab assignment are out of order. This Post considers “my” indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness in my practice, was supposed to be written in Week 31, and represents Activity 7. So, I am very late.

My lateness though does not mean that I have not been thinking about this topic. I have been reflecting on this topic for the past three weeks, mainly because I have not known how to approach the topic, and have also been feeling confused and, I have to confess, irritated about the topic itself. I watched Milne’s ULearn (2017) video to the CORE conference. Milne (2017) asks so much of educators and makes so many challenges to the prevailing ideas around pedagogy in schools. The tone of the questions and the rationale behind them remind me strongly of the work of Paolo Freire (2005), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I think Milne (2017) is calling for radicalization of our learners via culturally sustaining pedagogy.

Milne (2017) is suggesting that we educators must focus on culturally sustaining pedagogy using the next three steps:

1=Empowered cultural identity

2=Academic achievement

3=Action for social change

I’m fine with this.

There’s a BUT though. Looking at the continuum, “Eliminating the White Spaces”, shows me that my workplace is only part way there. I think we are only at the purple box – 

apart from our “separate” Maori Faculty, like a school-within-a-school, Te Ara Poutama. In my discipline area, marketing, we are not even at the “purple” box. We are stuck down the other end, the white end. Is this a problem? And why am I irritated about this final part of the assignment?

The reflective questions ask for a range of things, one of which is the extent of our own cultural understanding in our own practice. I am part-Maori, from my Father’s family. We are Ngati Apa/Nga Wairiki, from the Whanganui rohe. I was not brought up with my Maori heritage, and have only learned more in the last decade or so. We have land in the rohe, and thus a responsibility for our land and for those in the family who are also owners. Our values as a whanau do echo those of the university in which I work, but I cannot say that those values are particularly Maori. We have other values too, exemplified by my Father who speaks about the importance of hard work, trust, honesty, and fairness. These may be universal values.

And there’s the tension, for me. The values of my workplace, used in the title of this post, whilst recorded in Maori (and English) are not solely generated by Maori culture. How can they be? Many cultures share these values. If my workplace truly lived by these values, then we would see these working through the entire organisation, and there would be no division between our Maori “school-within-a-school” and the rest of us. All our learners would benefit from the way in which learning for Maori learners is personalized and structured.

So, maybe the “white spaces” continuum (Milne, 2017) works the other way around, too, where the “not-white spaces” are excluding those who previously only fit within the “white spaces”. I am also wondering about the rise of the Wananga. Have these institutions helped tertiary Maori learners advance? More so than a “conventional” western-style university? What does their “advance” look like?

Perhaps this is a little off-post, however I think there is a question to answer in the sense that Wananga represent “separateness” again, so those who are teaching at western-style tertiary institutions are excluded from learning about other, more inclusive ways because we do not have the opportunities to observe, and/or work with role models so we can aim for more culturally-responsive practice.

It’s a courageous person who critiques the prevailing wisdom. But this is exactly what Milne (2017) has done in the video calling for culturally sustaining pedagogy. If I think about my own practice, and use the research findings from Savage, Hindle et al. (2011) as a guide to assessing what I do, I find that my own practice is culturally sustaining – for Maori learners in my classes. However, I think the practices of my own organisation are not as culturally sustaining as they could be. This starts to answer the third question of the reflection for this post:  What next? What can my school do to move towards more culturally sustaining practice?

On a simple level, one thing we could do is we could stop lecturing so much to our students, and start involving them more in knowledge construction (Savage, Hindle, et al., 2011). My immediate response to this, though, is “how is this so different from the flipped classroom that we are all supposed to be implementing anyway?” I don’t believe that more culturally sustaining pedagogy is only the preserve of teachers working with Milne’s (2017) continuum. I think this is about authenticity, in the classroom, in how we teach, how we help learners, and how we structure curriculum. And no one culture has a sole claim to that.

I have to stop this post, it is too long and there are too many unanswered questions. If nothing else, this particular topic has helped me think more about how I situate my practice within the culturally-diverse classrooms I work within.

References.

CORE Education. (2017; 17 October). Dr Ann Milne, Colouring in the white spaces: Reclaiming cultural identity in whitestream schools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cTvi5qxqp4&feature=em-subs_digest 

Freire, P. (2005). The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. Continuum: New York.

Savage, C., Hindle, R., Meyer, L.H., Hynds, A., Penetito, W., & Sleeter, C.E. (2011). Culturally responsive pedagogies in the classroom: indigenous student experiences across the curriculum. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 39, No. 3, August 2011, 183–198.

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Broader Professional Context…or, if you like, contemporary trends in education.

Warning bells ringing already…this is a post for Week 30, which is all about situating our professional selves and practice into the broader context. To do this, we need to have an appreciation of contemporary trends in education.

Uh oh. The MindLab has just announced that they have a Digital Passport available to all teachers from Years 1 to 10, to help them acquire the knowledge and skills around computational thinking, and designing and developing digital outcomes. FANTASTIC.

According to the post, the Ministry of Education has announced that all teachers will be required to learn such computational thinking, and the ways to design and develop digital outcomes in their teaching.

Guess what? This is not happening at tertiary level, for tertiary teachers, not where I teach, anyway.

Why is this a potential problem for tertiary?? Because all these wonderful kiwi kids will flow out of the schools, some into universities, equipped with computational thinking skills and creative digital everything skills…and I believe that they will encounter this:

Tertiary teaching dinosaur systems. Not all the time, don’t get me wrong, there are wonderful people at tertiary striving to outwit the systems and include digital outcomes into their course materials and classroom practice, despite the dinosaur-like teaching environment we are all embedded into.

I notice that there are also a few system attitudes such as these lurking around…

I don’t believe we need to change our teachers (in the end, I’m not convinced we are most of the “problem”). Instead, we need to CHANGE THE SYSTEM.

Having just completed reading the e-book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Aoun, 2017), I am convinced that Aoun is correct when he says “to stay relevant in this new economic reality (of disruptive technology) higher education needs a dramatic realignment. Instead of educating students for jobs that are about to disappear under the rising tide of technology, twenty-first century universities should liberate them from outdated career models and give them ownership of their own futures. They should equip them with the literacies and skills they need to thrive in this new economy defined by technology, as well as continue to provide them with access to the learning they need to face the challenges of life in a diverse, global environment. Higher education needs a new model and a new orientation away from its dual focus on undergraduate and graduate students. Universities must broaden their reach to become engines for lifelong learning.” (from Aoun, 2017; “Introduction”).

Radical ideas, perhaps?

I suggest to readers that these ideas about what universities need to do to stay current are remarkably prescient. For example, if we consider trends that are shaping tertiary education practice (here I am specifically thinking about business schools), we will find that many businesses across many industry sectors are automating as much back-end business work as possible, using artificial intelligence applications (sometimes, just a chat bot) in order to save on staffing costs. Automation of back-end business functions is very efficient, and cheap. A good example of this trend is how much “grunt” (low level, basic skills) marketing communications and media work is now outsourced to artificially intelligent machines. Functions such as media planning and buying, or programmatic advertising scheduling. This kind of work used to be conducted in-house, by people working in the advertising or communications agencies. A quote from Grant Theron, Executive VP of global production and partnerships at one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing agencies, Young & Rubicam, exemplifies this trend: “the media industry is run by robots…it runs on computers and algorithms and targeting.” (Chapter 2, Aoun, 2017).

Using Rolfe’s (2001) Model of Reflection to analyse the implications of this trend for my tertiary teaching practice, we can see the challenge:

1. What (is the trend)?: (a) the disruption (or destruction) of conventional marketing jobs/job tasks by artificial intelligence; and (b) the failure of university marketing majors to recognize this disruption and to realign discipline content accordingly.

2.  So what? (analyse the trend): Aoun’s (2017) analysis provides an overview of the disruptive trends precipitated by artificial intelligence across a range of industries, marketing and media being one of them. I used other data showing these changes, taken directly from job websites (e.g. Seek.co.nz) so we can see the kind of change that is happening: for example, a Digital Campaign Manager (a typical communications role for a marketing communications person with some experience) must have the following suite of skills and expertise:

• Demonstrated ability to execute Digital Comms across platforms
• Lead-nurturing campaign management
• Deep SalesForce or Marketo marketing automation skills
• Knowledge in measuring and reporting campaign metrics
• Able to understand HTML and be able to originate solutions via partners.
• Knowledge of Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Adwords
• Strong written and presentation skills

Current marketing communications papers at my university teach little or none of this content, and little or none of these skills. Much of the technical content you see in the list above either sits in a computer science major, or a data analytics major, rarely selected by marketing students.

Evidence of the disruptions created to marketing roles is clear, as even a brief surf through entry-level jobs on Seek.co.nz shows. Typical entry-level jobs for marketing graduates call for digital and design skills including the ability to edit videos using a range of editing software; social media analytics skills and website support; Google analytics ability including automating the “back end” of communication campaigns, an understanding of campaign metrics and automated campaign measurement. Agility in learning a wide range of software that automates marketing functions is another requirement – often for entry-level jobs.

3. Now what? (critique and evaluate practice in the context of different audiences, and their responses to this trend).

There are two audience responses I am interested in evaluating:

1. my department’s readiness and understanding of how deeply marketing roles have changed, and how ready people are to realign discipline content.
2. the students readiness to learn more difficult, analytical-based marketing content, and how much understanding they have of what marketing roles look like now, compared to what they might imagine these jobs to be.

It’s very late – so I will finish this tomorrow. More to come!

March 20th; I promised I would finish this post as #3 needs answering.

Rolfe’s Model of Reflection (2001) calls for a “now what?” critique in terms of evaluating teaching and learning practice (more specifically, my own practice) in the context of different audiences, as I outline above. The first audience is the Department.

1. Issue: what is the Departmental readiness to align marketing discipline content with what marketing jobs are actually calling for?

How to answer this without being anecdotal? A look through the marketing papers offered for a (our) marketing major shows deficits in the core areas that the two jobs identified above include in their expected skills list. All the deficits are in technical areas, mostly in technology knowledge, skills and applications.

How does this relate to my own practice? An expectation of completing the DCL with Unitec will be that I share the learning, especially the wider, more contemporary viewpoint of moving marketing content into the digital space and how such updated content moves students into the contemporary marketing work-world.

Implications of sharing this learning: we lack the skills to teach the specific technology content that the students require. We possess the skills and knowledge base to teach  theoretical content, e.g. cognitions and consumer behaviour, but we lack the skills and knowledge base to take this further and teach the students to integrate this knowledge with designing a customer experience using basic HTML for example.

Summary: this post is too long. However, reflecting using Rolfe’s (2001) Model has usefully outlined for me where the knowledge and skill deficits are in one of my audiences; our Department. Where to from here? I am not yet convinced there is an appetite for the magnitude of change that I think is required to equip twenty-first century marketing students for their work-world.

References:

Rolfe, G., Freshwater D., Jasper, M. (2001). Adapted from: Critical Reflection in Nursing and the Helping Professions: a User’s Guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Online networking via social media applications…helping or hindering professional development?

Peddling around vineyards on a hot summer’s day in our beautiful Hawkes Bay got me thinking. What is it about online social networks (let’s drop the clumsy wording and just use “online social”) that could help someone like me develop professionally, or contribute to another colleague’s professional development?

An interesting question, because right up until now (2018) online social has been used by me nearly exclusively to keep my students engaged in the course. Reflecting on my use for professional development, though, I see now that I use online social just like a menu – surfing the internet for little interesting snippets and tips, tasting the occasional article to see if it could “work”, and looking at a wide range of sources from industry experts (are they experts, really?) to educator sources.

A very simple model of reflection in action was offered by Gibbs (1988; in Finlay, 2008), to help practitioners understand the links between theory and practice; that is, that both enrich the other.

However, looking more closely at this model, I can’t easily see how to apply the cycle to the use of online social for either my professional development, or to contribute to others. I can see how to use the model in terms of the student’s professional development, but that’s off topic.

If we consider the Google+ community as part of online social, then it is easy to see how school teachers are using and benefiting from the collaboration opportunities. This has not really been replicated with my university peers, certainly not in my work setting. So, I have been reflecting about business teaching academics and our seeming reluctance to get involved in professional development on the topics of teaching. Innovating Pedagogy (2016) provides a suite of ideas about incorporating online social to benefit teachers and learners. A key point that stuck with me for online social to work well is the use of a facilitator, who keeps people engaged and contributing. Another key point is to include experts so learners can discuss, check out their understandings and receive advice. Lastly, and quite significantly, managing such online social sites takes long-term commitment and enthusiasm from a facilitator and contributor/s.

So, where is this post going?

Starting with Gibb’s model (let’s make it work), what happened was that resistance to online social as a practical way to engage students and teaching academics surfaced early in my department. Comments that starting and managing a Facebook page (for example) would take far too much time that should be given to research were commonplace. In my area, I am the only lecturer who runs Facebook pages and a Twitter account to help the students engage with the course materials. The model asks for “thinking and feeling”; at the time I was very disappointed, and very surprised too – we teach marketing…which is hyper-digitized. I thought that alone would encourage people to use online social for teaching and learning. What was good and bad about the experience? Students responded positively and appropriately. Some colleagues ignored the opportunity to use online social to learn, and to communicate. The sense I make of the situation is that there are too many competing priorities for teaching academics, resulting in teaching and learning taking last place. This includes creating and participating in initiatives designed to help professional practice, and to move into using more contemporary pedagogical tools.

In sum: I could have worked harder to get buy-in. I could have demonstrated how using online social works very well with students and for our own professional development (although I have no real evidence for the latter). An action plan for the future is: provide the research that shows that online social is a must-use, almost mandatory now for marketing teaching academics, both for our students and for ourselves. I have academic articles I can use to back up this assertion, and six years of practical use of online social in a university business school to share.

References.

Finlay, L. (2008). Reflecting on “Reflective practice”. PBPL Paper 52; The Open University.
Sharples, M., de Roock, R., Ferguson, R., Gaved, M., Herodotu, C., Koh, E., Kukulska-  Hulme, A., Looi, C-K., McAndrew, P., Rienties, B., Weller, M., & Wong, L.H. (2016). Innovating Pedagogy. Exploring new forms of teaching, learning, and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University, Innovation Report 5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ethics, and the dilemmas faced by a teaching marketing academic.

This Blog post relates to Week 28, MindLab – ready for the last assignment. My thanks to another university colleague, Amanda, for helping me get back on track (even though this, and subsequent posts, will be late and/or out of order).

We are advised to use Rolfe’s Model of Reflection (Rolfe et.al., 2001) for a guided reflection. The first question from the model asks “What”; that is, identify the ethical dilemma faced.

The ethical dilemma I wish to write about involves “us” (marketing academics) helping a New Zealand start-up with their new research technique for shopper research. This is an application of VR (virtual reality) that enables retailers to access a shopper’s inner workings of their mind, whilst using the VR tool in the virtual reality shopping environment. On the face of it (no pun intended), the headset wearer looks as if they are playing an immersive game. In fact, they are, as the new technology uses gaming techniques plus advanced cognitive research to access a shopper’s instinctive reactions to “their shopping journey”. This is achieved by the VR headset recording instinctive moves, gestures, time spent looking at or “picking something up”, the heuristics used (shortcuts to decision making), eye tracking, and so on. This information gives the analyst, and ultimately the retailer, access to people’s “system 1” or instinctive responses to stimuli. Our system 1 responses are our unconscious, or sub-conscious responses to the world around us. Neuro-marketing and advanced cognitive research have been working hard to find tools and techniques that give access to people’s system 1 responses.

The New Zealand start-up has found a way to integrate the findings from advanced cognitive research with VR technology, to create an application enabling retailers to map the shopper’s instinctive responses to their shopping journey. The company wishes to exploit this technology and offer it to retailers so they are able to understand and to exploit shopper’s instinctive responses to product ranges, in-store design and so forth. Such deeper understanding is not available to retailers now via the usual language-based research applications.

The model suggested by Ehrich et. al., (2011) is helpful in so far as it draws attention to the interdependencies at work within complex ethical dilemmas. The first issue seems to be identifying the competing forces. In the case I have outlined, there are many competing forces, from the individual academic’s own values and beliefs, which are mediated by forces such as their own professional ethics, the culture of their organisation (in this case, my university), the public interest in such research advances, the global context (marketing is characterized by increasing data collection and subtle techniques to access consumer’s innermost thoughts, feelings, decisions, and so forth), and finally the global context. Other aspects to include are the legal issues and policies (if applicable), the institutional context, the broader society, and the political framework we live and work within.

What are a marketing academic’s choices when faced with a request from a company such as that outlined above? Some of the dilemma speaks to how society views the development of perceived “intrusive” technologies that help businesses make more profit. Some might speak to the real tensions that exist between academic marketers who believe that their function is to “pursue research that benefits business marketers”, and to others who believe that their function is to “use marketing tools and techniques to help individuals thrive and prosper”, or, if a macro-social marketer, to use marketing’s techniques to work for systemic change to some of society’s most pressing problems, such as ending poverty or environmental degradation. Put together, the tensions between marketers becomes very obvious.

These tensions have surfaced more frequently now that technological changes are enabling academic marketers to assist business marketers to access more and more of a consumer’s or shopper’s innermost “person”, for the purposes of profit. Some arguments against this view advocate that accessing such information enables marketers to serve consumers better, by identifying and attending to their individual needs based on their personal attributes.

A question for reflection on this point could be: “to what extent should academic marketing researchers pursue deep understanding of consumers (or shoppers) that involve accessing their subconscious lives?” and another, related question could ask “at what point and how much information is enough?”.

It may be too late to raise these questions. Advanced neuromarketing and cognitive research is one of the hallmarks of academic marketing research. I notice that discussions informed by ethical dimensions of this kind of research seem to be rare.

References:

Ehrich, L.C., Kimber, M., Millwater, J., & Cranston, M. (2011). Ethical dilemmas: a model to understand teacher practice. Teachers and teaching, theory and practice, Vol. 17, (2), 173-185.

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., & Jasper, M. ( 2001). Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Learning to be single-minded about the big goal, and sticking to it.

via Daily Prompt: Uncompromising

How hard to join in with our big family goal even though I know the benefits are good. How hard to be uncompromising about sticking to our goal, to not changing our goal, to keep focused on our goal despite all these other tempting distractions floating around in internet-land. Oh look! there’s 52 notifications for me on Twitter! Awesome, Facebook says two more friend requests! And one of my friends has put up new photos of her trip to Hawaii! Hey, another LinkedIn connection request and three more jobs found for me! Better check this out…! Worse…what about doing that conference paper for France? the one that I am supposed to be preparing, or how about completing the final assignment due for the post-grad certificate I am finishing…for March 27th.

Uncompromising. The word itself looks severe. If our big goal is financial freedom, and to achieve that means I must focus on our business activities, then I need to maintain an uncompromising stance towards distractions created for me (and used by me) in our internet-enabled world. That includes giving up surfing the online auction site to look for old furniture I can restore, until I have completed my health and safety work for our business. Use some creativity to help an uncompromising stance to focus on the 20% thing that will make 80% of the difference to our lives.

Writing this Blog ( I just went backwards and read from the start, July 2017) is kind of like writing a secret diary. Am I transformed yet into a 21st century academic activist person who is a digital and collaborative learning designer specialist?

I mostly think so. I now think digital and collaborative first, without exception. I’ve stopped thinking about “talk talk” or “lecture lecture” to university students. I just think about things we can do that make the content accessible by the students doing things with it using digital anything and by working collaboratively. That includes assignments. I even cooked up a redesign for the last semester of the marketing major. I highly doubt I will get anywhere with that, the forces of opposition are too great at my workplace towards a radical shift in practice.

The forces of opposition are illustrated easily by the appointment of a “digital champion” in our own department, nice person, but who has not worked through any of what I have with the MindLab. I reckon this is because I am away on sabbatical and no one thought of asking me. Duuh. This still rankles, I have so much to share in things teaching and learning and digital, I think it stinks that the one person who has worked away towards a radical change in practice was not considered. I wish there was somewhere else I could go teach, and use all the digital and collaborative stuff I have learnt.

A really honest (and grumpy?) blog post here…

Blogging.

Things have not turned out like I thought they would. The MindLab journey has been more difficult than I anticipated. Staying motivated to read the content for the online part of the course, and, worse, staying motivated to participate in the blogging (especially on the Google+ community) did not work for me.

Exploring the topic of motivation, I can draw a link from my experience to that of my students. Because we are (supposedly) “all individuals and all different” then our motivations are different, too. But I’m not so convinced about that. I am wondering about the motivation for learning, especially for young people faced with a three-year degree for which they will end up paying something around $25,000 to $30,000 (for a business degree). Our son completed two degrees – one a Bachelor of Commerce, and one a Bachelor of Science so has ended up paying nearly $70,000. Just as well he has ended up in an industry sector he loves with a big-paying job (currently).

So the end-goal for the qualification is supposed to be the motivator, right?? Well, if we take a look at some older motivation theories from individual psychology we could use McClelland’s Three Needs Theory (from Myers, 1993). People develop distinct needs via their cultural and life experiences, and from their cultural and group memberships. Some have high needs for achievement, some for affiliation, and others for power. These basic needs are the drivers of motivation for a range of life goals.

In practice, the needs are not so distinct. We have a mix, perhaps with one or two more dominant than another. If that is the case, then students approaching study may be operating from a need for achievement (in the earlier days) as they have bought into the system of education that we offer (or have socialised our young people, and ourselves, into).

This systemic way of “educating” our young people really bothers me. I can see the merits from the professions perspective; for example, we need doctors, dentists, pathologists, lawyers, engineers, mechanics, nurses, marine scientists and architects to grasp a range of highly specific content. There are a host of work roles where this is mandatory. The same could be said for many of the functions that business undertakes; e.g. accounting and finance need very specific knowledge, as does economics. But then there are some areas where I now wonder if more practical experience coupled with a different way of learning (shorter, smaller qualifications, project-based…?) would be more productive for the students and for us. Marketing, for me, is one of those areas, and that is what I am teaching.

Whilst it is true that marketers need specific content and skills, I believe that such content can be learned in study and on the job. In fact, because marketing is so hyper-digitized now, I think there is a real case for a university marketing degree to be compressed in under two years, fragmented into a more workshop based or modular term of study, and with much more flexibility built in such as the ability for students to choose a work partner to complete the last part of their course, e.g. the last semester.

These sentiments echo those of  the blogger featured here:

https://marketingland.com/5-things-university-marketing-degrees-arent-teaching-grads-marketing-105422#

and with which I agree.