Participants in this year's IBM Universities Business Challenge competed to make a fictional company profitable by winning market share. The Challenge has a first prize of £1,000.
Kunal Banka, whose team from Lancaster University Management School qualified for the Challenge final in March, believes that the competition made him fit for a real job: “I've learned more through this challenge than in the three years of my education,” says the 22-year-old business undergraduate, who now feels confident to return to India to run his family's business.
Students took managerial decisions, adjusted market strategies over time and applied the theoretical knowledge they learned at school to a practical situation: “It's just like in the real world”, says Lucianne Pharoah, a law and accounting student from Bournemouth University, whose team came second .
The 21-year-old, who was one of the few females in the challenge, particularly enjoyed the confidence boost the experience gave her: “Making those management decisions and seeing how they actually paid off in the end was great, and it has made me a lot more self-assured about entering the real world of business.”
Learning experiences aside, the challenges are primarily recruitment events for the companies that sponsor them, which are some of the biggest employers around. IBM, BNP Paribas, and L'Oreal have used business simulations as part of their hiring process.
“Companies take the technical skills in a student for granted", says Peter Cradwell, marketing director of Learning Dynamics, the company which developed the simulation model behind the IBM competition. “What breaks or makes them a successful applicant, however, is having the right social skills.”
According to Cradwell, the skills most sought by companies include an ability to think on your feet and to find solutions in a team through consensus. “The business simulations can teach students these things, and give them a head start in any assessment centre or interview.” Last year, for instance, 27 of the challenge participants got a job with IBM.
Learning Dynamics is planning to expand the Universities Business Challenge to Asia-Pacific countries and to launch a business simulation supplement to major college textbooks later this year.
Maximilian Tay, leader of the winning team of the Universities Business Challenge, also emphasises that financial theories were not the key to his team's success. In fact, none of the students on the winning team from Imperial College are enrolled in a business degree: they’re all studying engineering and math. “Knowing the theories can be useful, but there is a danger of overusing them. Intuition and a vast set of skills are much more important in real-life situations,” argues the 24-year-old.
The challenges are also simply about adrenaline, having fun and getting to know smart people.
Michael Stephan, a German business student at WHU Koblenz, enjoys business simulations so much he can hardly count how many he has already taken part in. Winning the Ace Manager Challenge of BNP Paribas in Paris this year was a highlight though, if less so for his girlfriend, he admits.
As part of the Challenge his team received questions regularly from BNP Paribas at 2am in the morning. The quicker they answered, the more points were credited to their account. “After a couple of weeks my girlfriend was really fed up with me. I had to promise to invest half of my 2.500 euro win in a holiday to Egypt for the two of us.” The rest of the money, he says, will be kept securely in his account. Just like any reasonable manager would do.
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