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Twenty Ideas for Continuous Learning

, by Andrea Celauro
BAA offers the Alumni community opportunities for lifelong learning and personal development through the activities of Topic Groups. They are organized by sector of interest, ranging from Energy to Culture, Accounting and Entrepreneurship and covering a total of twenty subject areas


Twenty Topic Groups for a total of 30 events organized in the first half of 2016, with over two thousand alumni involved. These numbers give a sense of the sizable work done by Topic Groups, the teams that the Bocconi Alumni Association (BAA) has created over the past five years with the aim of supporting the association's continuous learning activities.

An alum joins a Topic Groups according to her/his professional area of expertise or emerging interest in a particular industry, based on alumni profiles on the BAA site. Topic Groups are led by a duo composed of a Topic Leader chosen by the alumni themselves and a Bocconi or SDA Bocconi faculty member. "Topic Groups tend to mirror Bocconi's educational offer," Elena Gelosa explains. She is Marketing Topic Leader together with Prof Bruno Busacca. "The idea is to make the corporate and the academic interact in an exchange, where you can create continuous learning opportunities characterized by social networking and the sharing of experience, as well as professional development."

So the first element in Topic Groups is a merge between managerial and academic skills. The second is their being, at least for now, Milan-centric. In fact, territorial development of the association is entrusted to the BAA Area Chapters which crisscross Italy, Europe, Asia, America, and the rest of the world. But the collaborative spirit built into BAA has seen Topic Groups getting more and more involved in the organization of events in local BAA Chapters. "The heart of the activities of Topic Groups lies in Milan," says Gelosa, "but we are working, thanks to information technology, toward supplying content that is no longer localized." Hence the third point on which Topic Groups are focusing: a cross-topic approach that puts collaboration on content at the center of the various groups' endeavors.

This translates into continuous learning and personal involvement and enrichment: "Continuous learning has become increasingly important and ingrained in professional experience, so much that it is blurring the boundaries between education and profession," Elena Gelosa concludes. "In this respect, the work of Topic Groups gives alumni a valuable support in keeping their skills well honed."

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