A recent addition to the curriculum at SFU’s Beedie School of Business grants students a first-hand glimpse of just what working in the business world is like.

The Bookstore Product Management Experience, or BPME, is a “business challenge” that has been implemented into BUS 202 (Foundations for Collaborative Work Environments), currently in its fifth semester. In approximately 15-person teams, students work alongside the SFU Bookstore to manage, market, and do accounting work for a Beedie-themed product.

“They’re learning about collaboration, [so] they need to have something to collaborate on. That’s the venue [in] which they do that,” said Shauna Jones, professor at Beedie and co-instructor of the class. “It’s very experiential.”

Students make pitches to the bookstore regarding their intended strategies for marketing their product, use funds granted by the bookstore to achieve their objective, complete assignments relating to their teamwork and performance, and make recommendations to the store for how to improve their sales of the product in the future.

In lieu of exams and papers, the BPME favours coursework that allows Beedie students to work in a “real-life” business setting. In particular, the curriculum places a strong focus on students assessing and developing their ability to work in a team.

“People [have] been on sports teams, they’ve been in teams in different projects that they’ve had in class, they’ve done a bit on teams and volunteer work, but they’ll take teams to a certain level. Most teams — and this is also true for the workplace — will not actually get to that high performance stage, because they don’t want to work through the conflict,” said Jones, referring to the early stages of developing the bookstore challenge.

“What we’re doing in this is saying, ‘this is a course that’s related to teamwork. We want to take it up a notch. We want to take it to a level where they’re actually being collaborative.’”

Jones describes the BMPE as improving with each iteration, based on feedback from students and teaching assistants alike.

Although Jones acknowledged that not all students “see the value right away,” she concluded that those students often come to appreciate the experience and understand its worth after completing the project.

Indeed, many former participants in the BPME consider the course to be a powerful lesson in coordination and group skills.

Sean Brown, a current Beedie student, reflected on his experiences with the bookstore challenge: “We weren’t perfect by any means, but I think we definitely grew. We definitely learned, and understood what it actually entails to be in a [big] group, to work with 15 other people who have 15 different opinions and 15 different motivations.”

Brown elaborated on the particular skills the BPME taught its participants. “You learn what drives people to be the way they are. You learn how to work with other people [. . .] you have to understand where everybody comes from.

“Dealing with conflict is something that really arises from it. Everyone sees conflict as this negative thing [. . .] but a lot of the time, conflict is a way of getting better. If you’re not constantly facing opposing opinions, you can’t progress.”