Education for sustainability: creating skills in human capital analysis

This paper presents the role of an innovative university masters' degree programme as a basis for skills development in human capital analysis for finance and business students in their core degree programmes. The programme uses general systems theory to provide a framework for describing two components of the sustainable organisation: firstly, the inter-relationships of organisations to their context; and secondly, to describe the configuration of internal management systems. In the subject, the students take the role of human capital analysts in order to focus on defining, assessing and measuring the human elements of corporate sustainability. This postgraduate business subject has been developed within the framework of the UNSW guidelines on teaching and learning, designed to encourage innovation in both content and process. The authors conclude that the role of education is instrumental in creating a community of practice which uses sustainability principles as a basis for investment decision making amongst business students, who will be the next generation of executives and financial analysts.