Henley Africa’s ladder of learning bears fruit for executive education graduates

23rd June 2021, Johannesburg, South Africa. HENLEY Africa is set for another first – a mid-year graduation in July. There will be 19 virtual ceremonies held between 12 July and 27 July, with most of the 728 graduates coming from executive education programmes, ranging across Henley’s unique ladder of learning, but also including the open programme of the Advanced Certificate, Higher Diploma and Post Graduate diploma streams of management practice. 

The graduations will be virtual again, as they were at the end of last year, when Henley Africa, showing its agility, quickly adapted to host its biggest graduation ceremony to date virtually because of the COVID 19 pandemic. The business school will once again partner with PrivySeal, a tech company founded by South African attorney Stephen Logan, to ensure all certificates, diplomas and degrees are digitally certified and instantly verifiable against Henley’s graduate database.

The need to graduate the students now, rather than at the end of the year, as is typically done, is testament to the incredible appetite for business learning – particularly Henley Africa’s programmes, says Henley Africa dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley.

“We are delighted by the enthusiasm and success of the students who have come to us to work their way up the academic ladder into the pipeline to ultimately qualify for our internationally accredited flagship executive MBA, but we are especially humbled by the support and endorsement of our corporate partners who continue to entrust their staff to us along the same ladder of learning.”

Some of those companies include ABSA, Standard Bank, Glencore, Nedbank, Multichoice, Old Mutual, Eskom, Huawei, ABB, SARS, Siemens, AB Inbev, African Bank, Bryte, Liberty, Hollard, Transnet and the Civil Aviation Authority of South Africa.

“We pride ourselves on building the leaders who will build the businesses that will build Africa, the ongoing and indeed growing success of our executive education programme shows that many African businesses believe we are the right academic partners to growth leaders who will build their businesses.”

Executive education is at the core of Henley Africa’s DNA. The department, which didn’t exist a decade ago at the business school, today boasts an entire ladder of accredited qualifications that gives a new chance for people who have never had the opportunity but have the ability to progress from SAQA NQF level 5 to 9, the MBA itself.

“It’s something we feel incredibly strongly about,” says Foster-Pedley. “South Africa has the highest inequality in the world, and there are only two ways of sustainably addressing and ultimately resolving this: through education and building business. At Henley we do both, reducing the traditional barriers of education by allowing people to earn while they learn, teaching tools and providing lessons that are immediately applicable and measurable in the workplace and partnering with companies and institutions to help unlock the potential of their staff.”

• Henley Business School Africa is a leading global business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and Africa. It holds elite triple international accreditation; has the number 1 business school alumni network in the world for potential to network (Economist 2017); and is the number 1 African-accredited and -campused business school in the world for executive education (FT 2018, 2020), as well as the number 1 MBA business school in South Africa as rated by corporate SA (PMR.Africa 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021). Henley Africa is the first business school in Africa to be affiliated to the Latin American Council of Management Schools (CLADEA).