He says today’s employers are not looking for people with the right “skill set”, since these skills can all be taught in training programmes.

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Instead, companies want to recruit people with the right “mindset” and, most importantly, the right “attitude”.

Huang says: “They said, ‘Skills are not important; we can train them. We can train them to do bookkeeping … how to write reports and ways of doing presentations …

“‘But the mindset, the way of doing things and the attitudes need to be trained … we want people with a good mentality, a positive view [in facing] challenges and being more open to new things and learning’.”

He says university graduates can have many skills, yet still lack resilience or the ability to interact with other people. So, they find they cannot cope at work when trying to deal with difficult relationships or ever-changing challenges.

Education has ‘wrong focus’

The problem lies in having an education system that for more than a decade has failed to train students in line with the needs of the modern world, Huang says.

“The primary school and secondary school [training] focus [is] on discipline,” he says. “They focus on [teaching students] how to follow, how to comply, rather than how to be creative.”

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This particular focus of training has left the minds of many Hong Kong students too passive for far too long.

“When students come to university, they’re already [aged] 18 to 20; it’s hard to change their mentality,” Huang says.

This has led to university students from Hong Kong tending to be less assertive in class compared with those from the United States and Europe.

This is where Baptist University’s MScBM programme comes in – providing the right training for what is needed in the real world and helping to shape the ideal employees for companies.

“We want the whole programme to integrate the real-world experience with great theoretical thinking,” Huang says. “In most undergraduate programmes, students don’t have this kind of access to industry.”

To make learning “real and solid”, the programme has been designed to allow students to be taught by people with first-hand business experiences and insights.

“One-third of the teaching staff are retired senior executives, or part-time [practitioners],” Huang says. “So they really bring the real-world problems and experience to the class.”

‘Real world’ experience

Compulsory field trips are another key component for students to ensure they “see the real world”.

Every year, students will visit one of the three selected countries to learn how business is developed and run in a real-life context.

“In the one-week intensive visit, students will visit at least three to five companies and the executives in those companies will present how they do business, and even invite students to give them ideas on how to develop their business,” Huang says.

Cultural experiences are vital to help expose students to new ways of thinking and learning, he says. This is why these overseas trips involve not only company visits but also trips to a museum in Europe or a tea ceremony in Japan.

Huang believes exposing students to a world that is different from their own will help to enhance their “cultural intelligence”, change their thinking and – ultimately – transform them.

“You cannot be intelligent or creative without being exposed to diverse knowledge, context and culture,” he says. “We send them to the US and Europe to force them to [see] different cultures [and] different ways of running [a] business.”

Training to solve industry problems

Another key component of Baptist University’s programme is for students to develop a capstone project to solve a real problem facing a company – a requirement of many MBA programmes, but rarely found in other master or MSc programmes.

The programme sees students form into groups and spend six to eight months at a company so they can study its problems, then come up with solutions.

As for training students on their people skills, Huang says nothing is more effective than teamwork, which has been embedded throughout the programme.

“Teamwork is essential,” he says. “How can we appreciate other people’s work? How can we raise issues that may create negative feelings to[wards] our teammates? These are the interpersonal skills they need to learn.”

This kind of training is also highlighted in the annual extracurricular, endurance competition, the Asia-Pacific Business School Desert Challenge, which last April saw the students compete against other teams of MBA students from 109 business schools, including some from the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, in a three-day, 70km (43.5-mile) race in the Tengger Desert in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

“After three days, you see the change [in students] because in the middle of nowhere you have to face a lot of difficulty together,” says Huang, who led the university’s team.

“This is another way of training them how to cooperate with others.”