College of Business and Economics | Annual Report 2020 5 The UJ College of Business and Economics (CBE) has its purpose cut out: “The CBE develops critical thinkers and problem solvers who address business, economic and societal challenges”, monitored and evaluated against the UJ 2025 Strategic Plan. Of particular importance to the CBE is how COVID-19 accelerated the impact of technology on the world of work. The past two years saw the CBE community investing much thought into reimagining the profile of future graduates, flourishing in the field of economics and business. We focused on the intertwined impact of technology advances and COVID-19 on various economic sectors. For example, the disruption of health services, personal care, on-site customer service (e.g. retail, banks, restaurants), global tourism (airlines, airports, business, and leisure travel), outdoor production and maintenance (a sector that dropped by about 20%), and rail and road freight operations (affected by restricted production and movement of goods and services – notably the drop in global demand for commodities). Insight was gained into the behavioural shifts observed in e-commerce and digital transacting. Moreover, as seen across universities globally, teaching, learning, research, academic governance, and operations in the CBE simply had to shift in a matter of weeks from campus-based to mostly online@home.ac.za. A journey marked by a high intensity of unlearning, learning and relearning. Little did we know to what extent human interaction would become moderated. Being confined to a restricted living environment soon emphasised the physical and psychological wellbeing of the CBE community. We soon gained insight into the taxing nature of multitasking the pedagogy of care to both students and loved ones. Later, we were deeply affected as job losses and the passing of those close to us started to raise their ugly head. Regardless of these challenges, the CBE functioned at an unimaginable pace in 2020. The 2020 Annual Report testifies to much resilience and innovation, yielding improvement in 18 key performance indicators of at least 5% when compared to 2019 (Table I). As expected, we did not succeed in research, master’s, and doctoral output, where we observed a drop of at least 5%. These challenges are receiving much attention by the deanery.
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