Universities should be able to capture trends: Dzhangir Dzhangirov about how universities, not students and markets, are missing in change
Dzhangir Dzhangirov, Senior Vice President and Chief Risk Officer at Sberbank, has been teaching finance courses at ICEF for more than ten years. Here’s what Dzhangir thinks about the benefits of teaching for a practicing expert, what present-day employers can use to motivate their staff, and where universities and businesses can come together for more relevant training programmes.
Why did you decide to take up teaching and how did it benefit you as your non-core job?
I started teaching in 2003, at the very start of my career in finance, largely to improve my public speaking skills. In 2004, I set myself a new goal: to better understand my subject area. When you explain things time and again, you develop an in-depth understanding. Besides, teaching came with two more important benefits. It has become a source of candidates for my risk management team, and I did enrich it with quite a number of talented employees from among my students.
The second benefit is that teaching keeps you mentally agile. As a teacher, you tend to think you know your subject perfectly, until a question comes from one of the audience – usually someone who wants to get to the core of the problem – that takes it out of you. It gives you a shake, takes you out of your comfort zone, making you want to be able to see things from a broader perspective and a better persuader. I wish I had more time these days I could devote to teaching as a way to maintain intellectual fitness.
As a lecturer at ICEF and a top manager, can you say today’s students are different from the groups you had at the beginning of your teaching career?
Yes, but I don’t think the difference is due to the contents of the programme, since they haven’t changed much over the years, remaining fundamental in nature. Today’s students are a little different in the sense that they seem to know what they want and they know there’s a wide range of opportunities out there for them. As a young man fresh out of college, I was choosing between consulting and investment banking and I had very little vision, if any, of the transactions I’d be dealing with and in which capacity.
Present-day students seem to be far more broad-minded. They know how different lines of business, and among risk management, finance, etc., operate. They know how the world works and where to start with their career. What is more, they have motivational self-awareness and they seek jobs that would help them maintain a healthy work-life balance. This latter factor is what modern employers can no longer ignore. Nor do higher salaries continue to be prime incentives to motivate people to perform better these days. Employees want to know that the jobs they are doing create value.
There’s more to life than being a good employee, and people tend to develop a feeling that money and job satisfaction don’t always go hand in hand. It is a harmonious combination of all the pieces of life – work, friends, family, hobbies, etc. – that makes one pleased with how it’s going and causes him or her to be a better performing employee.
It all sounds fine, but modern employers are ever more faced with the need to generate new means of growth and motivation for their employees. Prospects of moving up the corporate ladder, promotion, and higher paying jobs no longer suffice.
Unlike before, a higher paying job is no longer a goal in itself
As teenagers mature in today’s world and their minds are influenced by the multitude of opportunities before them, they are unlikely to opt for jobs that would make them feel constrained. Why waste time putting bricks together when there are so many other scenarios for growth? Employers therefore find themselves in a situation forcing them to interact with people fresh out of college in ways that would boost their enthusiasm and let them see the value their jobs create for them and the company they work for.
Is there a skill gap between higher education and employability?
As a proponent of fundamentality, I am not advocating for bachelor's degree programmes to be abridged to a duration of two years to accommodate a longer practice. I would like them to have a greater degree of adjustability to overcome this inflexibility of the educational system at large, which makes it impossible for market innovations to be reflected in a timely manner. As new realities become ingrained in the economic life each new year, ways to update curricula continue to be discussed year on year, leaving students without proper skills to complement their fundamental knowledge.
It is essential that measures are taken to make bachelor’s degree programs more receptive to innovations and changes in the economic life, so as to make students better prepared to meet the expectations of the top employers already now, otherwise they are bound to graduate not fully competent.
One of the topics to be covered in more detail is ESG (Note: ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and (Corporate) Governance, which is a set of standards that companies embed into their business strategies for more effective environmental, social and corporate decision-making). An Economics major with little understanding of how ESG impacts financial markets, pricing, incentive packages and consumer behavior cannot be called competent. It is high time to transform the existing curricula – they badly need a change, like all else in this world.
Sberbank’s risk management team contributes to ICEF Master of Financial Economics programme by delivering Risk Management II, a hands-on course involving the examination of cases taken from Sberbank’s history and current project portfolio. The course maintains a strong focus on ensuring that the knowledge it delivers remains as fully reflexive of the bank’s current tasks and risk management expertise as possible.
It is my belief that the degree programmes must be updated regularly to reflect the current market trends. The process is still slow, though. Larger companies, and among them Sber, are working to develop their young hires’ skills using their own training programmes. Every year, my team joins SberUniversity to host Risk Management Academy for senior school students and university graduates. Our course has a duration of six months and is designed to provide the basics of risk management, so as to make learners competent enough by the time they graduate and join us.
Given the high rate at which the world is changing, it would be expedient also to develop a methodology for flexible embedding of elements such as mini-courses and electives into senior bachelor’s study programmes. That said, the universities – in pursuit of training excellence and proper adaptation – should be able to capture trends themselves.
One way to speed up change is by inviting businessmen to teach courses. Should businesses be encouraged enough to share their experience?
No matter how many people can be there who are willing to teach – and they are many, believe me – there is no marketplace to bring together universities and teachers from the industry. When asked if they would be willing to deliver a lecture of a course, my colleagues at Sber welcome the idea with enthusiasm. Teaching does, indeed, imply an investment of one’s time, and the support from universities would be very useful here. The cooperation should be beneficial for both sides.
The missing feedback loop between today’s businesses and fundamental education seems an obvious problem
For businessmen to feel encouraged to teach, they need to be incentivized – and money sounds a poor incentive in their case. A conventional letter of gratitude or recognition of their input is a much better idea. It’s always nice to be appreciated, and their role as lecturers can enhance practicing experts’ visibility, being also an asset to add to their portfolios. Strengthening their ties with business communities is actually what schools around the world should be focusing more on.