Connecting the next generation to the world of work with a little humour along the way

Professor Andy Adcroft is the recipient of a National Teaching Fellowship from Advance HE, one of the UK’s highest honours for university teaching, and in 2024 he was also part of a team recognised with a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence. The accolades give an indication of Andy’s passion for the teaching profession.

He views teaching as best delivered by a combination of active participation and independent learning. Rather than viewing students as passive recipients of knowledge, he argues that meaningful learning occurs when learners take responsibility for their own development, engage critically with ideas, and participate fully in academic life.

As Head of the Business School at Birkbeck, a role he took on in 2024, Andy leads on the strategy for research and teaching. He defines his own research as focused “on curiosity and its impact on academic performance” and, as far as teaching is concerned, he cites his philosophy as “people learn best when they work things out for themselves”.

Andy teaches modules on the ‘Help to Grow’ programme aimed at small and medium sized businesses and also teaches commercial awareness to students who don’t study a business related degree; a seemingly natural extension of his own degree in Politics and Economic & Social History. However, the route to undergraduate study wasn’t an entirely straightforward one.

His early ambitions centred on the acting profession with dreams of putting his talents towards film and the stage; but parental influence took his career in a different direction.

Patriarchal wisdom vs Chasing the dream
Before going to university, Andy had a place at drama school but says: “My father convinced me that it was better to be an unemployed actor with a degree rather than just an unemployed actor. So, (he said) go to university, get yourself a degree and you can do all that acting stuff afterwards. I see it in a slightly different way. I think I should never, ever have listened to him. There are lots of reasons why…one is that if you go and do three years of a degree, you're never then going to go to drama school. So my learning from it 40 years later, is the things that you regret in life are more likely to be opportunities that you had and that you didn't take advantage of. Even now, often after the Oscars or the BAFTAs or something like that, I will toss and turn and not sleep all night. And at 3:00 in the morning, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, the thought that's going through my head is, I should have gone to drama school.”

Andy is clear that he has no regrets on the career he’s built as a political economist and in management education, stating a “love for my career” and is especially enamoured when he talks about the world of higher education learning and the prospects for students. In doing so he reflects on his motivations as a 19-year-old university student:

Academics at the heart of engagement in the classroom
At a time when students don’t necessarily have the same level of ‘freedom’ he says he enjoyed, Andy credits academics as a drawing point for many students. From his personal standpoint, he says: “I chose stuff to study more on the back of who was teaching it and how interesting they were, how exciting they made classes than anything else. So, it was much more about where I was going to feel, particularly in my second year, where I was going to feel engaged in the classroom, that’s where I went. I think students work this out across generations really, really quickly, whether they want to be in the classroom or not, with academics who really want to teach. That authenticity around teaching is really important to me.”

From the classroom to stand-up comedy
With a passion for the performing arts and being much more interested in the lecture theatre style, rather than tutorials, where “you have much more of a performance”, it’s hardly surprising to hear that Andy stepped into the world of stand-up comedy and made his Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2013. It was just one year after doing his first comedy routine at Bright Club Guildford, along with six other academics; a prospect he says terrified him at first but he took the plunge upon the invitation to mesh the two worlds and derive comedy from his academic work. Besides performances in stand-up comedy, Andy has also hosted a breakfast radio programme for Eagle Radio, covering when one of their presenters was off. The multifaceted approach to his career gives him a great grounding for encouraging the next generation of students towards the world of work.

Business-ready graduates and graduate-ready businesses
Alongside his academic work, Andy has consistently sought to connect universities with wider society and believes that universities should be accessible institutions with a visible role in public life. He says: “Where we are distinctive, and this is a Birkbeck thing, not just a business school thing, there is nowhere in the UK that has that mixture of research intensity, culture and excellence with social mobility – other universities talk about it but it is in our DNA. We need to do all the regular stuff that business schools have to do, and that's a lot of fun, but we need to do it from a completely different place to pretty much every other business school, in a different way and from a different base.

"Business schools talk about business ready graduates but I think there's also a big piece of work we need to do about graduate ready businesses as well. So, we need to do much more of an education piece to business about the people they will be recruiting, (to tell them) these are the people who are coming into your organisation, these are the kind of things you will need to do in terms of keeping them and motivating them. Just as we can't create a student experience like mine for this generation of students, employers can't maintain an employment experience model from 20 years ago for this generation of graduates and expect it to work really, really well.”

Professor Andy Adcroft’s career illustrates a distinctive blend of academic scholarship, educational innovation, and public engagement, making him one of the UK’s most recognised voices in management education.