Companies hire thousands of business-school graduates every year only to spend months catching them up in the specific demands and skills of the job.
Now some of the biggest professional-services firms are changing tack to ensure their new-graduate hires are ready from the start or their existing employees have the skills to move onto bigger roles: They are customizing their own graduate-degree programs with training in company-tailored skill sets and real-time project work in lieu of traditional case studies.
By working directly with business schools to design bespoke graduate degrees, advisory and accounting firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Ernst & Young and KPMG say they aim to eliminate the lag that often exists between business-school curricula and the fast-evolving technological and data-analytical skills that they and their corporate clients require.
For students who enroll in the customized accounting or business-administration programs, the draw is often a guaranteed job upon graduation and, in many cases, fully covered tuition. The degrees themselves are equivalent to traditional masters in accounting or masters of business administration.
“This is a new frontier on how to collaborate with universities,” said Leah Houde, chief learning officer at PwC, which is partnering with Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business to test a new online masters in management with a focus on accounting analytics program this summer.
