UniCredit Master CIB: A New Format for Custom Programs

AT ITS EIGHTH EDITION, THE MBA LIKE SDA BOCCONI PROGRAM FOR CORPORATE INVESTMENT BANKING TALENTS SHIFTS TO A BLENDED FORMULA AND PAYS MORE ATTENTION TO LEADERSHIP, RELATIONAL SKILLS

The UniCredit Master CIB, one of SDA Bocconi School of Management’s flagship custom programs, shifts to an innovative, blended format in its eighth edition, which kicked-off yesterday. Thirty-seven young talents of UniCredit Corporate & Investment Banking from ten countries and eight business areas met in Milan with Bocconi professors and UniCredit top managers (including Co-Heads of CIB Division Olivier Khayat and Gianfranco Bisagni) for an opening day aimed at laying the foundations of the 18-month course that its Director, Stefano Gatti, describes as “an MBA-like program”.
 
General management, strategy, even logistics and other issues play an important role for two reasons: CIB managers must understand how their corporate clients think and “the participants”, says Thomas Kelly, Program manager at Unicredit, “are drawn from a Talent Pool that includes our potential future leaders. All of them come here with a solid specialized education”.
 
The new Master CIB is blended, i.e. alternates face-to-face and distance learning according to a pattern that sees a first, introductive session in a classroom, followed by a period of distance learning and a final, take-home session, again face-to-face, to discuss the acquired knowledge. “Compared to past editions”, Director Gatti says, “we devote more attention to soft, relational skills and it’s not a paradox that we do it in a blended program, because managers are called upon to exercise their soft skills in an increasingly digital environment”.
 
The new structure is the result of a co-design process managed by Bocconi professors, UniCredit managers and the personnel of BETA and Learning Lab, the centers that plan the future of learning at Bocconi University and SDA Bocconi School of Management. “Designing a blended program is not like designing a traditional course”, says Leonardo Caporarello, Head of both the centers and a Professor of Organization. “Here we can leverage on our distance learning design experience and on our knowledge of cutting edge research in the field. In a blended program such as the Master CIB the learning experience is extended both horizontally, because learning tools range from traditional books to interactive online assessments, and vertically, because the participants can go back to any online session in any moment and rate their own knowledge again and again, if needed”. The co-design process is a key to enhancing customers’ satisfaction that has recently led SDA Bocconi School of Management to place itself among the five best schools in the world for custom programs in Financial Times’ rankings.
 
“In this case”, UniCredit’s Kelly says, “we have struck a good balance between presence and distance, safeguarding the interactive dimension”.

(In the center of Piero Bellebono's picture: Gianfranco Bisagni, Stefano Gatti e Olivier Khayat)

by Fabio Todesco