The interactive Professional Development Matrix for Professional Managers

The Matrix Reloaded

Business schools are at the heart of their institutions' post-Covid recovery plans. More than ever we need to ensure that our research, education and outreach is relevant and focussed towards helping our nations and the wider world to recover, realising the potential of new and emergent ways of working and organising ourselves that have come into being over the past 12 months, whilst continually striving to support social and economic justice and reform.

Understanding your business school’s in-house and institutionally provided professional services capabilities, at all of school, team and individual levels, is key to supporting success. The need for professional services teams to be creative, flexible and resilient has come to the fore in ways we previously never imagined and the digital genie is fully out of the bottle! So, much like Keanu Reeves’ career, we must ‘embrace the music’ and focus on our greatest asset, our staff.

The Matrix (or Professional Development Matrix for Professional Managers to give it its full name) was originally launched in 2016 to support the work of Professional Managers in business schools. It has been successfully used by a number of business schools and some excellent examples of different approaches to its application can be found here. Like all good movie franchises, developmental tools need revisiting and updating to ensure they remain relevant and valuable to a modern audience. As well as updating the content, the Matrix has therefore importantly become an interactive tool.

Access the new interactive Professional Development Matrix here

You are now able to filter the Matrix by areas of competency and areas of business school operations. Each area is clickable to allow users to access cases studies from business schools across the UK and further afield as well as helpful links and other relevant information. We have begun populating the Matrix with these case studies. Continuing to populate it will be a community driven activity and we will crowd-source the case studies, links and supporting material from across the Chartered ABS Professional Managers community. The more we all contribute, the richer a resource this will become for us all.

Please explore the content available today and importantly please also do think about contributing to the growth of this support tool. Each of the eleven ‘Key Business School Activity’ areas has a 'sponsor' from the members of the Chartered ABS Professional Managers' Committee. If you would like to submit an article, case study, link or useful material for inclusion please email the Chartered ABS, via daniel.walsh@charteredabs.org, who will connect you with the relevant committee member.

We hope you find the Matrix helpful and are able to contribute to its growth and development.

I look forward to seeing you at our annual conference, PMAC2021, on 28-29 April.

Dr Andrew Glanfield (Director of Administration at Cardiff Business School) on behalf of the Chartered ABS Professional Managers' Committee.