Leadership training with horses

10.11.2025 Karin McEvoy helps students to improve their leadership skills. Not in the classroom, but on a horse farm. The exercises with horses helps participants acquire crucial leadership skills.

Key points at a glance

Employees need skills that can withstand change.
The teaching of such ‘future skills’ often requires new didactic approaches.
BFH is committed to innovative didactic formats.

Technological change, geo-economic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts and climate change are trends that will shape the global labour market by 2030, according to a World Economic Forum report published in 2025.

The labour market therefore poses challenges for students and thus also for BFH as an educational institution. What is needed is not more knowledge, but future skills. In order to teach these skills effectively, it is necessary to develop new methods.

Tangible future skills

This is why BFH is committed to supporting specific innovative didactic approaches. A prime example of this is BFH lecturer Karin McEvoy’s diagonal module ‘Führen und Auftreten – stark im Übergang’ (Leadership and presence – strong in transition). The course teaches students leadership skills in a very practical way – with horses.

What are future skills?

Future skills are abilities that enable people to master the increasingly complex challenges of the future. They are pivotal to long-term success in the labour market and are essential for shaping the digital society. The blog entry ‘Promoting future skills’ explains how BFH approaches the teaching of future skills.

Together with the necessary theoretical knowledge, horses help participants break down barriers and develop their leadership skills not only at a conceptual level, but also in practical terms.

Didactic excellence

Karin McEvoy successfully took part in BFH’s internal ‘Good Practice Future Skills’ competition with her module ‘Führen und Auftreten – stark im Übergang’ (Leadership and presence – strong in transition). The competition awards prizes for courses that teach creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, flexibility, self-efficacy and commitment alongside specialist content.

These include the Start-up Summer School 2025, where students experience and try out entrepreneurship; the module ‘Self-study with generative AI’, in which participants test the reflective and productive use of AI; and the specialist course ‘Unfulfilled desire to have children – holistic care and support’, which teaches students reflection, resilience, communication, resource orientation and experiential learning.