Graduate School of Business and Leadership

Dr Engelbrecht prefers to be called a scholar-practitioner, but also wonders whether he should be called an anarchist educator?

Having studied business and marketing at the former University of Natal, he dabbled, mostly unsuccessfully as he relates, in a range of business enterprises: buying and selling skorokoro; motorcycle trailer fabrication; rabbit farming; small project steel fabrication; gymwear apparel manufacture.

Entering secondary education in 1986, he swiftly exited and joined a venture capital agency in 1987 where he dedicated ten years to financing, advising and training entrepreneurs. As one of his final projects, he started consulting to NGOs in the social development sector. He says he “quite liked this” so left business development to establish an NGO, and pivoted to running one, until 2013. In this period, he consulted to the SME sector, started an accounting practice, closed some people’s businesses down, helped grow others, and also started teaching at the University of Natal where his last teaching post was as an adjunct appointee in the Graduate School of Business there. A familiar face on university campus he has facilitated over a hundred courses in the last fifteen years. He views his most recent appointment as Academic Leader of the MBA programme in the UKZN Graduate School of Business and Leadership to be a culmination of his enterprise and education sector experience. He teaches Financial Reporting and Analysis and has research interests in adult education and human capital development, entrepreneurial thinking and entrepreneurship, applied business management, technology applications in education, corporate disclosure and governance.