Thomas Bieger on the EFMD Board of Trustees

18 July 2017. The European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) is an international association based in Brussels. The organisation deals with the accreditation of business schools and individual management programmes. Thomas Bieger has been on the association’s Board of Trustees since July 2017. As a member of the Board, he is involved in various strategic functions of the organisation.

Global network: 900 members in 86 countries

EFMD is a non-profit organisation that was established in 1972 and has over 900 members from trade and industry, as well as from universities and corporations, public services and consultancy. Its members come from a total of 86 countries, a majority of them from the UK. At present, the association has 17 Swiss members. The EFMD promotes the exchange of the best possible approaches to solutions, as well as competitive comparisons in the field of basic and advanced management training.

The EFMD is acknowledged to be a worldwide accreditation institution for business schools and their curricula, as well as for technically supported forms of learning. With EQUIS (European Quality Improvement System) it created a European accreditation standard in 1997 which serves many business schools as evidence of quality. It is roughly equivalent to the US-American standard of the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business).

Safeguarding quality in teaching and research

"The internationally recognised quality of our teaching is very important to us. That’s why we introduced extensive quality assurance measures," says Thomas Bieger. The University of St.Gallen organises teaching and research along the lines of EQUIS and AACSB quality standards. In the context of accreditations, independent experts regularly measure the HSG against the highest international quality standards. The University of St.Gallen has been EQUIS-accredited since 2001 and AACSB-accredited since 2003. At the time, the HSG was the first university in the German-speaking area to have acquired the two demanding seals of approval for business schools.

Source: EFMD