Why University education is so different from Business training?

I am currently enrolled in an Executive MBA course at Fundesem, a local business school in Alicante (Spain), and I am writing about this when I just celebrated my 54 birthday a couple of weeks ago. I guess I will keep learning as long as my heart keeps me alive.

At this age, I spent there most Friday evenings and Saturday mornings, and I have to spend some of my very limited free time to study and prepare homework, and… I just love it.

I could talk about the value of the trainers, and the value and relevance of the topics covered, but the biggest value comes form the interaction with the other students enrolled in this course. Due to my travel schedule, I need to miss some classes, but I have the opportunity of attending them later at a different location: Albacete. Wherever there is a problem, there is an opportunity as well: due to my scheduling problem, I can enjoy learning from two very talented teams of experienced students, one team in Alicante and a different team in Albacete.

I was driving back home last Friday and I just realized how much I enjoy this training, and how different this is from my first years in college. This drove me to a key question: Why college education has to be so different from professional education?

My story

I enrolled in college (Civil Engineering school at UPV) highly motivated, back in 1976, after several years of working all my holidays as a surveyor, surveying rural roads and irrigation channels in the countryside of Alicante. My father is a retired surveyor, and he taught me Trigonometry and some basic Surveying techniques when I was 11 or 12 years old. So, I became a part time surveyor when I was 15 years old (the year earlier I was only carrying the surveyor ruler, or doing some calculations to learn the ropes, so it would not count as proper work). This helped me contribute to my family finances for some years, and later on gave me the chance of becoming independent and paying for my education through college.

When I arrived to college I expected to learn more about the topics I loved, roads, irrigation channels, pipelines, surveying, and so on. Instead, I was forced to learn something “very important” for civil engineers: the equation of Schrödinger for the second electron of the Helium´s atom. I can´t imagine what type of value this knowledge could bring to a civil engineer. However, my internal memory unit is clever enough to decide what I need to keep in central memory, so I managed to forget that stuff long ago.

I thought that the second year would be better, but it mostly wasn’t. Then the third year arrived, but I was too busy trying to pass the exams of tensor calculus and other deep scientific topics, to think about when we would start learning about roads, channels and pipelines. However, that third year I was lucky enough to have a great professor of Surveying and Photogrammetry (Prof. Manuel Chueca Pazos) and I saw for the first time that professors could be relevant in college, with direct real life professional application of their studies. Some years later, I worked for him, becoming a lecturer in his department for six years.

Then, in the fourth year, I had an amazing professor of Applied Statistics (the late Prof. Juan Benet, don´t confuse him with the famous Spanish engineer and author with the same name) who was a the same time deeply technical, highly relevant and very entertaining. I will always remember his classes.

Looking back to those years, I can see that the technical and scientific difficulty of those subjects helped shaping my brain, and that the absurd difficulty of the exams (often with passing rates of less than 10%) helped tremendously my ability to solve complex problems of any kind. However, the personal cost of that effort was tremendous, and attending those courses was very painful to the point that most of us could easily consider those years the worst years of our lives. During those years, I could hardly do anything else than studying all the time, weekends included, and sadly too often I had to decide between attending a class or staying at home studying.

What a difference from my business studies of this year. I am always looking forward to the next day in class. Always inspired by the trainers and my classmates. I hardly miss a class, and I am enjoying this training far more than any training I attended in the past.

(picture from www.fundesem.com)

We typically say that there is no excuse for being boring in class (or speaking in a conference). A boring trainer or speaker does not get the message through, risking to lose the time of the professionals attending the class or conference session. A the same time, we are on the business of providing relevant training. The type of training that enables professionals to enhance their skills and abilities.

We are not in this business just to make a buck.

We are in this business because we believe 100% in its value, short and long term, because we see the results day by day, because we enjoy doing what we do, and because we love it. I hope that this love shows in each and every course we teach, and each and every consulting project we deliver.