Purpose: For business and management higher education (HE) to transition graduates to digital workplaces and careers, it's crucial they develop competencies (digital and traditional, soft and technical, new and old) that are relevant and applicable. Design/methodology/approach: Insights are obtained from 60 comprehensive interviews with HE business students, educators and industry practitioners. Findings: Six synergistic competencies are described that leverage synergies of (often) divergent competencies in the digital age of business, integrating them with a recently emerged multi-disciplinary competency framework. Each synergy states its target application, purpose and is aligned with specific HE practices. Originality/value: Scholarship of competencies is re-oriented away from clusters and towards synergies, with a new inter-disciplinary competency framework validated to business in the digital age, with directions provided for HE.