Red & Yellow becomes South Africa's first Creative School of Business

Tertiary institutions have to continuously innovate to ensure that their students are able to thrive in this increasingly artificially intelligent and digital world. Most importantly though, it is crucial that they harness the skill of creative thinking, so critical for success in business – specifically at management level. The role of higher education is to future-proof careers, by encouraging our young workforce to think differently and have the ability to translate this into action in the workplace.

Over the next generation, many of the jobs we know today will be overrun by increasingly capable, sophisticated artificially intelligent machines (A.I) as they replace age-old professionals like lawyers, accountants and even doctors.

For over 23 years, the Red & Yellow School has been teaching the most essential skills of the 21st century and, has produced creative thinkers who have gone on to become business and industry leaders on a global stage.

It has recently repositioned itself to be a Creative School of Business that provides students and working professionals with the commercial logic to grow successful organisations and more importantly, the creative magic to set them apart.

“For centuries one’s survival in the business arena was centred around the individual's incredible intelligence - most notably - their ability to remember a great deal of information and recall it very quickly,” says Rob Stokes, Chairman of Red & Yellow and founder of digital powerhouse Quirk which was sold to London-listed WPP in 2014. “With this task now being executed infinitely faster and cheaper by a machine, it’s the creative problems solvers who will thrive.”

“Fortunately, humans will always fare better than machines at being human, and we need to play to this competitive strength,” shares serial entrepreneur Stokes. “In the 21st Century, skills like creative thinking and uniquely human abilities such as leadership, negotiation and social intelligence are going to become even more important in the business world.”

To ensure learners are getting the careers skills they need to thrive in today's digital world the Red & Yellow school has added Management Studies and Human Studies to its existing Marketing and Creative Production faculties.

These faculties are integrated across all programmes and courses to ensure Red & Yellow Alumni are logical business thinkers who understand both human behaviour and use the magic of creative thinking to build successful businesses.

On-campus and online learning experiences offer an array of full-time and part-time options, geared to teach the great creators, inventors, leaders and entrepreneurs of the 21st Century.

Programmes range from one-year industry-geared Certificates, to its flagship BA Degree in Visual Communications with its variety of specialisations, and the iconic Marketing and Advertising Communications Diploma for graduates that’s produced a huge number of leaders for that industry.

These campus programmes are complemented by the school’s suite of online courses and an executive education offering that is geared to ensure corporates get maximum return on the B-BBEE Skills Development spend, retain key black talent, and accelerate their business executives through skills needed to grow successful organisations.

One of Red & Yellow's most important points of difference has been its partnership with industry. The school’s alumni are known as practically trained and work ready, but with new leadership team from business, not academia, at the helm - this strength is set to grow even further.