Welcome to the New Academic Year 2026/2027 at SBS Swiss Business School: A Message from Academic Dean Prof. Dr. Bert Wolfs

Dear students, colleagues, partners, and staff,

I want to start with something I have heard from almost every first-year student I have spoken to this month, and I suspect it is in this room right now.

"What if I chose wrong?"

What if the profession I am studying for disappears before I finish my studies? What if the thing I am good at gets automated, or outsourced, or quietly stops mattering? What if I graduate into a world that has moved on without me?

I am not going to tell you that fear is unfounded. It isn't. Entire categories of work are being rewritten in real time, and no Academic Dean, no Minister, no forecast can tell you with confidence what the labor market will look like when you walk across the graduation stage. Anyone who promises you certainty is selling something.

What I can tell you is what I have repeatedly watched happen to graduates of this wonderful institution. The ones who thrive are rarely the ones who knew the most on the day they graduated. They are the ones who learned how to stand in front of a problem with no precedent and stay standing. Who could work with people who think differently from them? Who could act when the instructions ran out, and computers gave up?

That is not a small skill. It is, increasingly, the only durable one. And it is not taught by being told things. It is taught by doing things, badly at first, with real stakes and real people, until you get better. That is what a university of applied sciences is for. Not to hand you a fixed set of answers, but to build in you the capacity to keep generating new ones, because the questions will keep changing.

So let me be specific about what I am asking of each of you this year.

To our new students: you will fail at something this year. A project will go wrong. A job search will be harder than you expected. Good. That is not the system malfunctioning; that is the system working. Stay with it. Ask for help earlier than you feel comfortable.

To our returning students: you know how SBS works now. Go deeper. Take the harder brief. Mentor someone in their first week. Start the thing you have been putting off. Make the SBS Bridge Day a learning and successful experience!

To our faculty and staff: your job is no longer to deliver information. Information is free. Your job, the one no machine can do, is to teach judgment. To sit with a stuck student and help them learn how to think, not just what to think. Thank you for that work. It is the whole SBS!

To our partners in industry and the local community, do not just take our students. Please tell us what you cannot find. Please tell us where we are falling short. The gap between what we teach and what you need is not yours to fix alone, nor is it ours to hide. Let us close it together.

And to everyone in this room, whatever brought you here today, one last thought.

The world of work is not a place that is waiting for you somewhere over the horizon. It is being built right now, in decisions being made this morning by people who are not in this room. Our task, yours and mine, is to make sure that when those decisions are made, there are people at the table who know how to do things and who do care about why.

That is what you came here for. Not for a certificate. For improving yourself, discovering your personal borders, and shining with your four Cs Skills: Communication, Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking. Do not forget to network, and, finally, remember that you are the only CEO of your own career. Welcome and good luck! Start with having SBS learning fun!

Prof. Dr. Bert Wolfs
Academic Dean
SBS Swiss Business School

Watch Prof. Dr. Bert Wolfs' welcome message to SBS students as we begin the 2026/2027 academic year.

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