Especially the beginning of a bachelor’s program is often challenging and presents young students with many changes and uncertainties: living alone for the first time, finding their way around a new city and a changed social environment, a sometimes heavy workload with reduced leisure time, but also strokes of fate such as illness or death can become topics.
Munich Business School starts here in accordance with its value of responsibility – which, in addition to the business level, also means a mindful approach to oneself – by assigning a student coach to its bachelor’s students, for example, who provides individual support and helps them with their personal questions.
Resilience is the key word here, which the World Economic Forum recently listed as one of the top 15 skills for 2025: the ability to have or develop psychological strength to cope with difficult situations and crises without long-term impairment.
Always with the new competencies of the 21st century in mind, MBS has therefore for the first time rolled out the course Resilience Management in the fall semester 2020 as part of the curriculum optimization of the International Business bachelor’s program. The course covers the first two semesters and is mandatory for all bachelor’s students.
Academic director Prof. Dr. Patricia Kraft explains: “It has been clear not only since the outbreak of the Corona pandemic that resilience is a very valuable competence and of great relevance for every individual in a private, corporate and social context and will continue to grow in importance. That is why it is important for us to specifically pick up our students here. For example, the course answers the following questions: What skills do I need to cope with stress and crisis? How can I strengthen my own resilience with concrete exercises and instruments? With these and other topics, the newly designed course provides our students with concrete support for their studies, but also beyond.
What Resilience Management is in the bachelor’s program, is in a similar form and related starting points in the master’s programs the firmly established and popular elective course Success Factor Happiness, which Professor Dr. Christian Schmidkonz has been leading since 2014. Here students deal with subjective well-being, mindfulness, job satisfaction, gratitude and many other related topics from neuroscience, psychology and marketing.
These topics are also reflected in the research activities of the MBS faculty. Just this fall, for example, Professor Dr. Arnd Albrecht published the book Burn-out – Stress – Depression. Interdisziplinäre Strategien für Ärzte, Therapeuten und Coaches together with burnout expert and chief physician of the psychosomatic Schön Klinik Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hillert. And in the publication Happiness im Business. Zufriedene Mitarbeiter – glückliche Manager – erfolgreiche Unternehmen Professor Dr. Christian Schmidkonz takes up the topic of happiness together with other experts, to name just a few of the diverse and relevant MBS publications.
