The organisation

Warwick Business School is an established global superstar in the business education market. In the 2020 Financial Times Ranking, it is ranked No.1 globally for its distance learning MBA. Warwick has earned the top slot by sustained investment in distance learning over many years. This front runner knowledge has proved invaluable with the global pandemic. Warwick is also enormously popular for its specialist Master in Business programmes, with students from all over the world participating.

The challenge

The Masters programme has developed a module called ‘business in practice’ which has become legendary over the last few years. Teams of students compete in a business simulation over 2 weeks that helps them apply their learning in practice. Several hundred students take part, and the event historically involved physical lectures and face to face role plays. In March 2020, it become clear that all students would have to leave the campus and work from home to complete their programme.

This gave just 2 months to completely transform the programme to an on-line version.

The solution

One part of the programme involves training the students to making a sales pitch to a potential client. In 2020, this is a reality for many sales professionals, so we had already been active in providing training on-line to support clients. Because of the large number of students involved, and the need to provide a measure of individual help and coaching, we rapidly deployed 14 trainers from our European team to deliver the programme.

A fully interactive training programme delivered on-line was carefully customised to support the students based on the actual criteria they would be judged on in the business simulation. The content was based on latest emergent best practices in remote selling.
The international team deployed was an important compliment to the international cohort of students.

We also designed and delivered a customer retention workshop based on giving and receiving feedback as part of the programme. This session strongly supports the reflective learning essay students must produce to pass the module.

Next Steps

The praise from the students for the overall event was heart-warming. You can experience it in this video about the Business in Practice experience.

One thing is for certain, Warwick Business School will not rest on its laurels, and you can be sure the 2021 programme will evolve based on the experience!