Stop Adding. Start Integrating.

• Faculty development programs enable professors to stay current with important trends, but too often such programs are stressful additions to ongoing responsibilities.
• One solution is for faculty to integrate fragmented workloads with a four-part model, in which they examine existing projects, align them with new objectives, recognize connections, and navigate among the possible new directions.
• Workload integration will only occur if institutions carry some of the load by creating space for experimentation, tracking what’s happening in industry, and avoiding unnecessary duplication of data.

 
If business schools are to remain relevant, they must provide ongoing faculty development programs. Yet faculty already have many responsibilities: preparing students for the changing job market, conducting relevant research, adopting new technologies, and engaging with industry and the surrounding community. The challenge for schools is not simply keeping professors current, but doing so without making already fragmented workloads more complex.

Faculty development is a key component of AACSB’s 2026 Global Standards for Business Education. Specifically, Standard 3 calls for schools to sustain faculty currency and document faculty development processes. Other standards emphasize the need for positive outcomes and continuous improvement, and they outline expectations for impact across curriculum, scholarship, and engagement.

The external pressure for faculty development also is clear. The World Economic Forum reports that 63 percent of employers identify skills gaps as major barriers to their transformation, and 85 percent plan to upskill employees to work alongside AI. And yet, only 12 percent of schools require faculty to undergo training in AI or generative AI, according to AACSB’s 2025 study of global GenAI Adoption in Business Schools. The majority of faculty, 69 percent, rely on self-directed learning to keep up with AI trends.

What if the best way to maximize the impact of faculty development is not to offer more of it, but to adopt an integrated approach that takes greater advantage of what faculty are already doing?

Integration should not mean accumulation. Faculty should not need separate development tracks for teaching, research, and engagement—nor should they be expected to turn every activity into all three. A better development model would start with work that is already underway. It would help faculty recognize where meaningful connections exist and support them in pursuing only the ones that matter.

That is the premise behind a faculty development model we call EARN—examine, align, recognize, navigate. The model helps faculty and institutions connect teaching, research, and engagement by identifying where work already in progress can create value across more than one mission without requiring unnecessary additional work.

The Real Challenge

Examples of promising practices already can be found for integrating faculty development into all three areas:

Teaching. Through workshops led by the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai, faculty from across India have trained in simulation pedagogy with Harvard Business Publishing, according to an article in AACSB Insights. Of the more than 500 faculty who participated in the workshops, 40 percent later incorporated simulations into their teaching.

Research and teaching. The same article describes a case study unit at Qatar University in Doha where faculty receive help writing, teaching, and publishing cases grounded in regional issues. This enables them to produce scholarship, classroom materials, and industry relationships from one line of work.

Engagement, teaching, and research. At King’s Business School at King’s College London, Executive Fellows work with academic sponsors across education, research, and thought leadership to bring current industry expertise into faculty work. Similarly, the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder launched an AI initiative spanning teaching, research, and operations. Conversations with KPMG and PwC helped shape curriculum decisions, feeding coordinated work across roughly 14 core courses and nearly 50 instructors.

These examples suggest that there is no shortage of good practices. Even so, many schools still separately manage teaching development, research development, and industry engagement even when the work overlaps. What schools are missing is an operating model that makes those connections intentional without asking faculty to do more.

An Operating Framework

The EARN model, which the two of us co-developed, began as a framework for integrating workforce-aligned credentials into courses. It evolved through continued application into the broader model described here.

EARN is not intended to replace continuous improvement strategies, which are designed to strengthen a defined activity or process. EARN addresses a different problem: fragmentation across faculty work. It helps professors identify whether work originating in teaching, research, or engagement has legitimate value elsewhere—and then enables them to pursue only the connections worth carrying forward. The unit of improvement is not simply the course, study, or partnership. It is the connections among them.

The three missions carry equal weight, and faculty can enter through any one of them. A course redesign may begin in teaching, an AI-adoption study in research, or an employer need in engagement. EARN helps faculty see how work in one area can be repurposed in another.

For example, a faculty member on a regional workforce board might turn a recurring employer concern into a research question and later use the findings to redesign an assignment. Teaching becomes the destination rather than the origin, without manufacturing additional work for faculty in any of the three missions.

Wherever the starting point, faculty can begin where the work already is. Rather than pursuing every possible connection, they can make decisions based on three factors: value, fit, and feasibility. Value considers whether a pathway offers a meaningful contribution to teaching, research, or engagement. Fit examines alignment with faculty expertise, responsibilities, and institutional priorities. Feasibility considers the time, evidence, partnerships, and resources available. Integration does not require every activity to produce outcomes across all three missions; other pathways are opportunities, not obligations.

EARN also can run forward or backward. Faculty can recognize value in completed work, but the greater payoff comes if they use the framework while they’re designing a course, study, or partnership, so cross-mission potential is visible from the start. The three faculty missions become connected learning loops rather than separate workloads.

One Practical Example

EARN grew out of an initiative at Jackson State University in Mississippi, when industry-aligned microcredentials were embedded into a graduate business analytics course. Once the microcredentials were part of the course and no longer a separate option, the student completion rate rose from 34 percent to 85 percent.

After the EARN framework was applied, it became apparent that the same body of work could create value across teaching, research, and engagement:

Examine. By considering the evidence, faculty saw an opportunity within teaching. Employers were looking for students who not only could build dashboards but also could interpret results, communicate uncertainty, evaluate AI-generated analyses, and recommend action.

Align. Instead of adding another class or requirement to meet these goals, faculty embedded selected industry credential content into the existing course.

Recognize. The implementation produced evidence of student learning and credential completion, which became the basis for a scholarly article currently pending journal publication. This research has also been shared in conference presentations and professional forums as service and engagement.

Rather than pursuing every possible connection, faculty can make decisions based on three factors: value, fit, and feasibility.

Navigate. These connections created choices rather than obligations. Faculty could evaluate whether to refine the teaching model, extend the research, share the practice, or test the broader operating model. Using value, fit, and feasibility as guides, they could consider which opportunity offered meaningful impact, aligned with their expertise and institutional priorities, and could be pursued with available evidence and resources.

The resulting evidence also supported scholarship and professional dissemination, demonstrating how one teaching initiative could generate value across multiple faculty missions without requiring three independent projects.

EARN and Artificial Intelligence

A second example comes from a faculty member who has traditionally spent significant class time demonstrating how to complete a technical analysis step by step. As generative AI becomes capable of producing much of that initial analysis, the teacher can use EARN to consider how human expertise can add the greatest value to the course:

Examine. The faculty member first considers what is changing for students when digital tools can generate technical analyses in seconds.

Align. The faculty member adjusts teaching to emphasize human judgment and accountability—the ability to frame problems, evaluate the quality of AI-generated analyses, identify misleading conclusions, and defend recommendations. This ensures that classroom content now is in line with the needs of the workplace. The teacher’s role has not diminished; it has merely shifted along a faculty role intensity continuum.

Recognize. The professor identifies the ways the redesign creates value beyond the course. It produces evidence of student learning in teaching; it can become the basis for scholarship on AI-enabled learning in research; and it can inform faculty development sessions and curriculum conversations as engagement and service.

Navigate. As in the previous example, these connections create choices rather than obligations as the faculty member considers value, fit, and feasibility. For example, refining the classroom approach might take priority if it offers immediate benefits to student learning and can be accomplished within existing responsibilities. If the redesign generates sufficient evidence and aligns with the faculty member’s research interests, scholarship might become the next step. EARN helps faculty determine where their expertise can create meaningful value without requiring them to pursue every possible connection.

As these examples illustrate, new avenues for teaching, research, and engagement often open up when faculty interact with industry partners or participate in corporate internships. When an employer surfaces a need, faculty and students can study the situation and generate evidence, and industry partners can review what worked. These findings in turn feed the curriculum, the next collaboration, or ongoing scholarship. In this way, industry engagement becomes a faculty development tool, not merely a student placement strategy.

Supporting the Model

An operating model only works when institutional systems support it. We suggest that business school leaders enable EARN by taking five steps:

Create capacity. Designate space within existing workloads for faculty to experiment, collaborate, and translate learning into practice. Create these spaces by offering protected development time, workload flexibility, and coordinated initiatives, or by replacing rather than simply adding activities.

Collect signals. Track what is happening among employers, alumni, students, professional groups, technological outlets, and community members, and share that information systematically with faculty.

EARN only stays weightless for faculty if the institution carries the load. The model is not a request for faculty to “work smarter” inside unchanged systems.

Repurpose evidence when appropriate. The design principle of “capture once, count many” does not mean that one artifact satisfies every purpose. However, the institution should reduce unnecessary duplication in how evidence is captured and routed across teaching, scholarship, engagement, and accreditation.

Delineate pathways. Make it clear how faculty can move their promising work toward publication, grants, partnerships, curriculum change, or broader dissemination.

Provide recognition. Ensure workload, evaluation, promotion, and reward systems acknowledge meaningful work that crosses traditional academic boundaries.

EARN only stays weightless for faculty if the institution carries the load. The model is not a request for faculty to “work smarter” inside unchanged systems. When schools supply capacity, signals, evidence systems, pathways, and recognition, integration can happen seamlessly inside existing work. When they don’t, EARN becomes one more thing faculty must add to an overloaded plate—the outcome it was designed to prevent.

Stop Adding, Start Connecting

Business schools cannot respond to every new technology, employer expectation, or learner need by adding another workshop. They will find it more sustainable to strengthen faculty’s capacity to interpret change and design institutional systems that turn learning into impact.

The first iteration of the EARN model grew from considering how existing faculty work could move across teaching, research, and engagement. A control group is currently piloting a Phase 2 model to examine EARN more systematically so that we can learn more about how faculty are applying it across disciplines and can find ways to improve its adoption.

But the framework remains simple. Start with one piece of faculty work already underway and run it through EARN: Examine what is changing. Align the change with meaningful teaching, research, and engagement. Recognize the evidence and value that the work can generate. Navigate toward the next meaningful opportunity. Throughout this process, follow only the connections that create value, capture evidence without unnecessary duplication, and choose one meaningful next move. Equally important, recognize when a potential connection is not worth pursuing, protecting the capacity to focus on work that creates meaningful value.

Continuous improvement can strengthen the work. EARN helps faculty see where the work can connect. The question for business school leaders, then, is not simply, How much are we investing in faculty development? A better question is, Are we investing in ways that help faculty connect teaching, research, and engagement—and turn learning into impact?

One effort. Less fragmentation. More value.