The promotion of innovation in the field of education and research, the cultural alignment of the talent of all its internal stakeholders and the commitment to internationalization are the weapons with which the ESIC business school aims to achieve profitable growth and sustainable, both globally and in each of its units. According to the strategic plan that they have presented this week, named Surfing 2025, the school sets a turnover target of around 100 million euros and to achieve an overall return of 11% of EBITDA on gross turnover.
The strategic plan is based on four pillars. The first is to redefine and strengthen the position of the institution in all its lines of business, and for this it intends to consolidate itself as a reference institution. The second is to be an organization based on people, talent and the pride of belonging, while the third pillar is to achieve sustainable growth, based on both a national and international territorial plan, as well as attracting new business. Finally, it is intended to generate a more agile governance model that allows optimizing the institution's efficiency and leveraging future growth.
Designed to face the challenges of the economy sector, the plan has been carried out by more than 65 professionals with a very collaborative and transparent will, in which it has been tried to identify the current and future needs of the institution in order to continue being an organization that accompanies and is present in the important moments of his students, at the same time that he promotes the transformation of people so that they can develop successfully in their professional life in a responsible way and be agents of change in organizations and in society.
Eduardo Gómez Martín, president of the business school, acknowledged during the presentation that "the education sector is going through a difficult time." In this sense, one of the main concerns that he pointed out is "that in recent years many new educational business models have been born that have pushed the sector into a price war." "At ESIC we have not wanted to enter the tariff game, nor have we been tempted by investment funds," recalled the president.
Gómez Martín pointed out that they have recently gone through two major crises. The first, that of the covid, from which they have been able to emerge without having to do an ERTE. The second, after the pandemic, having opted for a structural change in which a lot of effort has been put into promoting venues such as Valencia, Barcelona, or Colombia. He stressed that the next great crisis in education is coming for 2030, when the demographic crisis marks the lack of students and to this is added that there are more and more operators.
From ESIC they recognize that not much focus has been placed on online training and that it may be one of their pending subjects. According to the school, the student to whom they are directed has a different profile, to that of the one who seeks training exclusively at a distance, and after the pandemic it has been shown that students demand more face-to-face classes. Likewise, they recognize that the two systems, face-to-face and online, tend to be more and more hybrid and that they are betting on teaching in which the two models coexist.
Gómez Martín defined ESIC in three words. The first, specialization. “The business school has the will to be good at everything, but very good at something. That is why we have always wanted to stand out in marketing with a strong fixation on the client and the market”. The second term with which he defined the institution is company, noting that the school "has as one of its objectives to know the real demand of companies." And lastly, experience. According to Gómez Martín "knowledge is important, but the experience that a student can have is something that cannot be replicated."
ESIC has more than 16,350 students between the three business units. Specifically, 3,000 in universities, 12,700 in the business school and 650 in higher education degrees. Between these three branches they add up to more than 1,125 employees. At the national level it has 11 campuses and internationally they already have their own campus in Brazil and another in Colombia. To this must be added the agreements with more than 120 international universities and their offices in Peru and China. The president of ESIC finished his speech by insisting that “when we talk about education we deal with a profound vocational issue that directly affects society. The numbers have to come out, but our activity does not have to be exclusively a business”.
