Cornell adds two more management majors to business curriculum

Cornell College has significantly increased its business offering over the last few years, and now it’s adding two more majors: business management and personnel management.

“With a strong lineup of business classes in place, we felt it was time to expand the business major by offering specializations in business that are not mathematically intimidating and that will have broad, generalist appeal,” said David Joyce Professor of Economics and Business Todd Knoop.

The personnel track focuses on understanding and managing people in business contexts, while the general management option introduces students to studies about how a business is impacted by economics, finance, analytics, and human factors.

Common career fields for personnel management graduates include training and development, human resources, and compensation and benefits. Graduates with a degree in general management will typically begin their careers as management generalists and then gain expertise through work experience in a specific industry or organization.

These two new business tracks prepare Cornell’s students to compete for the ever–evolving job opportunities in the worlds of business and entrepreneurship.

“Jobs for the 21st century are jobs that that cannot easily be replaced by a robot or an artificial intelligence machine, and are not repeatable in the sense that they require new activities each and every day,” Knoop said. “The jobs of tomorrow are jobs that require people to think critically and creatively, to communicate effectively, to synthesize diverse information, to have hard skills in quantitative analysis, but also soft skills in human relations and team building.  These are exactly the skills that these new management majors will develop, and will prepare our students for jobs of the future, not the past.”

The curriculum for these majors will be available starting in the fall of 2017.

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