Built by Business, Led by Purpose: How Melbourne Business School is Evolving Executive Education

An in-depth conversation with Magnus Gittins, Chief Executive Education Officer, Melbourne Business School.

At a Glance

Melbourne Business School is a highly regarded Australian business school, known for its leadership programs and close connection to the world of work. In Executive Education, MBS is evolving how it designs, delivers and scales learning in response to changing client needs, new technologies and rising expectations around measurable impact.

In this interview, Magnus shares the strategic thinking behind MBS's move from a traditional distinction between open programs and custom programs toward a more connected model – one that spans short courses, tailored organisational learning, enterprise capability programs and ongoing learner pathways.

Founded by Business, for Business

Melbourne Business School has a distinctive history and structure. It is jointly owned by the University of Melbourne and members of the Australian business community, reflecting its founding purpose: to connect rigorous management education with the needs of business and society.

MBS was founded by business, for business. That has always given the School a very practical orientation – staying close to the world of work and to the leadership challenges organisations are facing.

This structure influences how MBS thinks about its customers, designs its programs and measures success. It helps keep the School closely oriented toward the realities of professional life, while still drawing on the academic rigour and research depth of a leading university.

Magnus came to MBS from a background in consulting – a career defined by helping organisations solve problems. He sees a direct line between that work and executive education.

I have always enjoyed working with organisations on complex problems. Executive education is a very purposeful version of that work: helping organisations and individuals build the capability they need to perform, adapt and lead.

Who MBS Serves – and What They Need

The MBS learner population spans two broad groups. The first are aspiring and current leaders – people looking to step up into greater responsibility, move into the C-suite, or prepare for a director or CEO role. The second are professionals seeking specific technical skills: AI literacy, commercial acumen, financial fluency, and executive communication.

"We organise our portfolio to provide both leadership accelerators and opportunities to acquire additional technical skills in areas where there's a particular need," Magnus explains.

Increasingly, those two tracks are converging. MBS is seeing sustained demand for its flagship leadership programs while also experiencing growth in shorter technical courses – particularly around AI, data, and digital capability.

We're partnering with a growing number of organisations to help them achieve their strategic goals through learning and capability development – that's one of the strongest areas of growth for us.

Technology as an Enabler, Not a Constraint

MBS has invested in creating a more connected technology architecture across its CRM, Executive Education platform, learning management system and finance environment.

For Executive Education, we needed technology that better reflected the way our learners and client organisations engage with us. The important point is that MBS Academy operates within our broader systems environment, helping us support Executive Education while building a more connected MBS community.

This integration matters for several reasons. It enables personalised, tailored experiences to both organisations and learners. It allows MBS to recognise all alumni – whether from degree programs or executive education – as part of a single community. And it creates pathways between programs that are visible and actionable, rather than siloed by team or product type.

Many higher education systems were designed primarily around degree programs. Executive education needs something more flexible and end-to-end: from the first conversation with a client or learner, through enrolment and delivery, and then into ongoing engagement.

But Magnus's ambition extends beyond the in-program experience. He points to a significant gap in how most institutions use technology: the periods between learning. How do you maintain a valued relationship with a learner or client organisation when they're not actively enrolled in a program? How do you understand their evolving needs and surface relevant opportunities without being intrusive or generic?

These are questions driving MBS's ongoing technology strategy – and questions that many institutions across the industry are still working through. The ambition is not to turn every learner relationship into a transaction. It is to remain useful to people and organisations over time.

Industry-Scale Solutions

Some of MBS's most notable work sits at the intersection of industry need, philanthropic support, and scalable technology.

"I describe this to colleagues as a Venn diagram," Magnus says. "You're looking for spaces where there's a really clear need that's sufficiently large, a way of dealing with the economics and the affordability, and then what's our role as a business school – do we have anything to add? If those three aspects overlap, there's usually a conversation worth having."

The academy model is designed to be scalable. MBS uses its technology platform to support co-branded learning environments, scholarship allocation, enrolment workflows and learner communications. This allows complex partnerships to be delivered with greater consistency and less administrative friction.

Magnus sees this as a growing part of MBS's future – and an area where working with channel partners, peak bodies, government, and philanthropic funders creates opportunities to solve problems that would otherwise remain intractable.

Building a Portfolio That Works

Portfolio discipline is something Magnus talks about with candour. The risk for any provider, he observes, is ending up with a fragmented collection of courses that makes sense internally but is difficult for customers to navigate.

The risk is building a portfolio that reflects internal interests more than external need. We try to keep asking a simple question: does this look ordered, clear and valuable from the customer's perspective?

MBS is strengthening a disciplined process for adding to its portfolio. It begins with design principles that govern the portfolio as a whole, followed by consideration of market need, product-market fit, the competitive environment and whether MBS can offer something genuinely distinctive.

When the evidence supports moving forward, MBS favours lower-risk pilots – often face-to-face – before making larger investments in digital assets or scaled delivery. Commercial parameters are set intentionally to prioritise long-term quality over short-term profit margin.

In the first iterations, our priority is to validate the need, get the learning experience right, and build something that can endure. The commercial model matters, but long-term quality matters more.

The goal is to build a focused portfolio of programs with genuine market demand, delivered at sufficient frequency to create quality, consistency and commercial sustainability – rather than a sprawling catalogue that stretches resources thin.

Designing for the Room – and for the People Who Sent Them

In organisational learning, many participants are sponsored into programs by their employers. That creates a dual responsibility: to support the learner as an individual, and to help the sponsoring organisation understand how learning can translate back into workplace impact.

MBS is actively working to close that loop. The goal is not to breach the confidences of participants, but to honour the investment the organisation has made.

When an organisation sponsors someone into a program, we have an obligation – within agreed privacy, consent and reporting boundaries – to help that organisation support the learner's development back in the workplace. That is not about breaching participant confidence. It is about helping the learning translate into impact.

This challenge has a design dimension too. When an organisation commissions learning, it brings its own view of what success looks like – shaped by culture, strategy and the pressures of the moment. Part of MBS's role is to bring that context together with evidence-based practice. Navigating that gap is one of the more delicate tasks in program design.

Magnus is clear about where MBS stands:

We have a responsibility to bring evidence-based rigour. At the same time, that rigour only creates value when it is translated into the reality of the organisation and the roles people actually hold.

Best-practice frameworks only create change when they're translated into something a learner can actually see themselves applying within the reality of their role.

The discovery process MBS runs at the outset of any organisational engagement is designed to surface exactly this: the strategic ambitions of the organisation, what's currently happening on the ground, and where MBS's perspective on best practice intersects with both. The answer, Magnus says, lies at the intersection of those three – and it varies meaningfully from client to client.

There is also a deeper question: organisational culture. Even the most well-designed program can stall if the environment doesn't create permission for change. The skill of a good educator is knowing how to establish a north star of best practice while also meeting the organisation where it actually is – and helping participants see a credible path from one to the other.

AI: Opportunity, Disruption, and Open Questions

Like every institution in this space, MBS is grappling with what artificial intelligence means for its business.

Our focus is on using AI in ways that genuinely improve learning: better preparation, better practice, better feedback and better transfer back to the workplace. The test is not whether AI is interesting; it is whether it helps learners and organisations achieve better outcomes.

Internally, MBS has established a community of practice focused on viable AI use cases. Current areas of exploration include AI-enabled support for business development, routine data tasks and evaluation reporting – all with the aim of improving efficiency, consistency and insight.

The bigger opportunity is AI-enhanced learning experiences. One possible future direction is consent-based, privacy-conscious AI-enabled coaching that helps participants practise and reflect on real workplace scenarios – for example, preparing for a difficult conversation or negotiation, receiving feedback in a safe environment, and then applying that learning back at work.

Used well, AI can amplify the learning experience. It can help learners practise more, receive more timely feedback and connect the learning more directly to the situations they face at work.

As for the impact of AI on the traditional course model within the business, Magnus argues it's too early to say, and that it may play out differently depending on the types of experiences and the types of learners at hand. He sees disruption as more likely in programs that are primarily content-led, and less likely in highly experiential programs where peer learning, reflection and human judgement are central.

Could I imagine a highly experiential program for a small, senior cohort of board directors being replaced by AI? No. But could AI play a much larger role in technical skilling across an enterprise? Yes.

Measuring What Actually Matters

The question of impact measurement is one the industry has wrestled with for decades. Magnus observes a maturing of expectations: organisations are moving beyond an overly narrow focus on financial ROI – which is notoriously difficult to attribute causally – toward a more nuanced reading of the signals that matter.

We are moving beyond simplistic ROI claims toward a more mature view of impact. Learning is one part of a broader system, so the better question is: what capabilities, behaviours and organisational outcomes are we trying to shift, and what evidence would show progress?

MBS's approach to measurement is context-led and embedded into program design from the outset. Working with client organisations, the school identifies the strategic indicators they're hoping to shift, translates those into learning design decisions, and builds measurement touchpoints into the experience in a way that feels natural rather than onerous.

The result is a set of three measurement packages – each adaptable to the client's context – that align evaluation to organisational goals rather than generic satisfaction scores.

Advice for the Industry

Magnus is clear about the lessons he would offer other providers seeking to build sustainable short course or executive education portfolios.

The first is the importance of establishing product-market fit.

There's no automatic right to win just because you have a strong brand. There may well be a gap in the market – but is there a market in the gap? We turn that question over repeatedly before launching something new.

The second is portfolio overreach. A common risk is launching too many courses before demand has been properly tested, and then finding that the portfolio is difficult to market, sell and sustain. Magnus advocates starting small, building momentum with a tight set of programs, and earning the right to expand.

For institutions with existing organisational relationships, Magnus says learning solutions may often provide a stronger starting point than launching a large open short course portfolio from scratch.

If you already have strong organisational relationships, it is often easier to start by working with those stakeholders to co-create something that solves a real challenge. Open short courses can be very powerful, but they require clear product-market fit, strong marketing capability and sustained investment to gain traction.

And for those looking to scale without letting costs outpace revenue, three principles apply: invest early in scalable technology; build the client engagement capability required to generate demand; and keep the portfolio focused.

You get much more leverage from a focused portfolio of high-demand programs than from a long list of programs that run infrequently. That focus helps with marketing, sales, operations, learner experience and faculty relationships.

Key Takeaways

The conversation with Magnus surfaces a set of principles that apply well beyond MBS:

1. Structure shapes culture. MBS's founding model – connected to both the University of Melbourne and the business community – gives it a distinctive orientation toward the world of work.
2. The learner and the sponsoring organisation both matter. Executive education providers need to support the individual learner experience while helping organisations create the conditions for learning to translate into impact – within clear privacy and consent boundaries.
3. Technology is the enabler, not the product. The real value of integrated systems is in the client experience, the alumni relationship, and the operational scalability – not the platform itself.
4. Product-market fit is non-negotiable. Brand alone does not fill programs. Market analysis, lower-risk piloting and commercial discipline help distinguish sustainable portfolios from fragmented catalogues.
5. Industry-scale solutions represent an important opportunity. Where there's a large unmet need, an affordability problem, and a clear role for a credible provider – that's a conversation worth having.
6. Start with relationships, not just programs. For institutions with strong organisational relationships, tailored learning solutions can provide a powerful path to initial traction before scaling a broader short course portfolio.

About This Series

Founded in Practice is an interview series produced by Josh Humphries from Guroo Learning, featuring leaders of professional education businesses sharing insights and lessons learned on successfully running a short course or executive education operation.