Current Cohort complete Business Acumen for Technical Leaders “Boot Camp”

The Business Acumen for Technical Leaders (APPP 504) course is offered as part of the MEL and MHLP professional master's degree, which provides students with an exciting and interactive introduction to business fundamentals and the understanding of how business expertise can be applied to a technical career. As part of specialized course materials, both MEL and MHLP students’ alike, recently conducted the comprehensive summer “Boot Camp”. In collaboration with the UBC Sauder School of Business, the Business Acumen for Technical Leaders course is exclusive to MEL and MHLP programs that offers the students a great opportunity to work closely with colleagues from integrated technical specialities and hone their business acumen throughout a variety of business principles. Concentrated over three weeks in August, the interactive Boot Camp style course focus on six core business competencies: Strategy, Marketing, Operations & Logistics, Accounting, Human Resources, and Entrepreneurship. Working closely with industry and academic professionals, students have the opportunity to learn from both formal lecture-based and hands on case-based approaches. At the same time, working with group projects and presentations allows the students to consolidate their learnings and demonstrate their understanding through relevant and contextual applications.

“APPP 504 was a very beneficial course. The material covered was interesting and is relevant to our future careers.” (Student Feedback)

Perry Atwal, a UBC Sauder School of Business Instructor believes “the different topics, range of backgrounds of students, and intense pace ensures a lively atmosphere that is positive, rewarding, and fun. Business can be seen from many perspectives. Our intention is to open the eyes of students to approach any business problems from a variety of angles.” With a diverse professional background from within the MEL and MHLP programs, APPP 504 provides an ideal environment to immerse students from different backgrounds into the world of business.

“I found the Boot Camp very valuable in terms of touching on 6 different key topics which will be useful for an engineer like me. The group assignments work really helped to come out of comfort zone and involve with people from various backgrounds.” (Student Feedback)

“Understanding the business of technical” is at the essence of the Boot Camp, developing the students wider understanding and enhancing the technical application’s business influence allows for a more well rounded leader and project understanding.