Associate Professor Sabina Cerimagic, Executive Dean and Acting Executive Director

2023. It has been quite a year for AIM Business School.

We started 2023 with the launch of our inaugural Full-Tuition Scholarship in January. In this campaign, we awarded free tuition for our MBA to three outstanding and ambitious individuals:

• Rebecca Hyland, a Kamilaroi woman who has dedicated the past 19 years to First Nations engagement, health, and leadership in various public and private roles, striving to close the gap with our First Nations communities.
• Luis Malaver-Ortega, who as co-Founder and co-CEO of Me&Biotech, a pioneering company in the field of cellular agriculture, is committed to fostering the growth of Australia's manufacturing capabilities and making a positive impact on the world.
• Jaimee Galloway, a young single mother and CEO of Youth Flourish Outdoors, a registered charity and registered social enterprise that champions a trauma-informed and human rights approach to youth mental health.

Additionally, another 770 new students at AIM Business School were awarded smaller scholarships that provide tuition relief and allow easier access to career-changing higher education.

AIM Business School continued to grow and expand the programs we offer throughout the year. Our newest class of qualification, the Postgraduate Microcredential, had two additional courses added to its portfolio in March: Cyber Security and the Cloud and Marketing for Managers. In August, we were excited to add another course to this group with Emerging Technologies and Digital Leadership. We also updated our LMS (Learning Management System) to ensure a more seamless, accessible, and achievable learning experience for our students.

Across all our programs and qualifications, from these Postgraduate Microcredentials through to our Graduate Certificates and MBA, a total of 2,488 units of study were successfully completed by our students.

Over the course of the year, we undertook a deep review of our branding and website, and we were very excited when we got to deploy our new, beautiful website in October. This review was largely cosmetic, but included revisions to how we illustrate the unique advantages of studying at AIM Business School.

Our students had a combined 4,238 one-to-one sessions with their Success Coach to help them better understand learning material and gain feedback on their assessments before submission.

AIM Business School also held our first ever alumni networking event at our campus in Sydney. We hosted a breakfast with 16 of our graduates that included a presentation from Scentia CEO Martin Mercer speaking on the responsibility of managers to build positive working culture and own the results. In his words, "The role of leaders is to create the conditions in which performance happens.”

We will be hosting regular networking events in 2024. And then we had our final celebration for the year: the graduation of our class of 2023. Held at the beautiful Doltone House in Sydney on November 15th, we had an amazing time recognising the incredible academic achievement of our graduates. This is the second year in a row we have been able to host graduation events that our students are worthy of, so we are very grateful for the opportunity to celebrate with them and their loved ones.

A total of 516 students at AIM Business School graduated in 2023. We are very proud of them and excited to see where their careers go from here.

2024 is just around the corner, another year for us to continue our goal of helping Australians gain the essential, advanced business skills they need to be the leaders of the future.

We are going to be upgrading all of our units throughout next year, a process that involves both updating the content and renaming for greater contextuality, so keep your eyes peeled in January for the first round of these changes.