A weekend during the programme is dedicated to Outdoor Training activities, which focus on Personal Development and Management Behaviour.
These activities will also be carried out jointly with students from the other Professional Masters programmes. This is aimed at fostering networking between students studying different functional areas and facilitates cohesion between programme participants.
This immersion experience provides each participant with self-evaluation tools, laying on activities and posing challenges that are far removed from the usual office environment. The reflections on your management behaviour should prove extremely useful in helping you attain the programme's objectives.
Outdoor Trainingis an excellent activity for discovering and developing 'people skills'. The training strongly influences individual and group attitudes through its emphasis on experience-based learning. Our experience led us to design the Outdoor Training to reflect the kind of activities found in companies. We deliberately avoided potentially risky activities of the 'outward bound' type, whose cognitive content is virtually non-existent. Faculty members explain the conceptual model and act as coaches, creating an ideal learning environment. Their function is not so much to teach as to transform and facilitate learning processes. The work teams are composed so as to achieve as much variety between their members as possible. Our intention is to simulate a real team that has to meet certain objectives. Some participants, who are chosen by the group, must take fairly complex decisions during the Outdoor Training/ Action Learning; the exchange of roles forms a unique feature of the Outdoor / Action Learning module.
Each participant receives feedback regarding the decisions made by the work group. The personal skills learnt can immediately be put into practice in daily work situations in an almost intuitive fashion.
The conceptual model is one of "Action Learning" and comprises six stages:
Experience-based
Reflection on the learning model
Presentation and analysis of the activity to be planned
Execution of the activity outside the classroom
Feedback in small groups on the decisions taken
Evaluation of the learning process and transfer of the lessons learnt to participants' work settings
