Improving career prospects is the most common reason for doing an MBA, a TopMBA.com poll has found, with over half of MBA candidates making this a reason to attend business school. However, learning new skills and achieving a leadership position are joint and close second place in the list of MBA priorities.
48% of respondents to a survey conducted by topmba.com are looking for MBA courses that are not traditional full time programs.
In recent years business schools have proliferated their programmes to a great extent with better part time and, executive MBAs, for a more experienced age group but also largely part time.
Additionally, generation Y (15-30 year olds in 2010) have been using the internet for a majority of their adult lives and, as William McDonald of Thunderbird says, they have come to trust the Internet as a source of information. Let’s not forget that professors and academics at business schools are getting simultaneously more net-savvy and top business schools are advancing their distance learning MBAs with online modules in a more sophisticated way than could even have been imagined ten years ago.
The topmba.com survey (see it here) is a multiple choice poll, allowing voters to choose as many options as they like. It shows that 52% of the 1,234 respondents, as I write, are considering a full time MBA programme. 25% would consider doing an online MBA (good luck with that!) while 15% consider distance learning as an option, with its proportion of the course that is on-campus. Part-time courses, meanwhile, only appeal to one in four of respondents with executive MBAs around one in eight, which sounds about right.
So what can be accounting for this downshift in popularity of full-time courses? The full time program has always been seen as the daddy of the MBA world, but is this changing? In my writing and meeting people interested in MBAs, one message is quite clear, that the latest generation of MBA candidates is concerned about the time and the cost involved, not just the fees of the course itself, but the cost of relocation, of being away from the workplace for too long and stepping away from their careers in such a capricious job market.
Additionally, they believe that they can get the personal networks, if not the diversity of a classroom, by studying off campus.
Finally, recruiters, traditionally resistant to the old correspondence course methods of teaching, are learning that distance taught MBAs have a set of skills (personal motivation and computer expertise for example) that are of great benefit in todays business world.
Whether or not this a long-term change is hard to predict. As the online generation of MBAs emerges into the workplace, their careers will be followed closely by the next. However, as online MBAs continue to develop their delivery techniques, who knows. Maybe campus-learned MBAs will become a thing of the past?
Are MBA fairs worth it? Of course they are. What’s the worse that can happen? You go, decide it’s not for you and save yourself a lot of hard graft, not to mention financial outlay. Or you go, meet some people who can give you sound advice on how to go about getting into to their business school – or even tell you not to apply for them as you ought to be applying to a business school that fits you better?
The business schools love them. MBA fairs that is. Take a look at this video.
With unemployment across the Eurozone now hovering at just over 10%, more and more business school graduates in Europe are having a tough time re-entering the job market.
But a closer look at the figures reveals striking differences in rates of recovery across individual Eurozone countries and must surely be creating headaches for policy makers at the European Central Bank on how to set interest rates in the future. Take Germany, for instance.
While the unemployment rate in the Eurozone overall has increased from the record low of 7.2% set in January 2008 to over 10%, the German unemployment rate has actually decreased during this period, from 7.8% to 7.6%, equalling an almost two decade low.
“There is a very high demand for highly qualified managers in Germany these days, and this trend is likely to continue and even intensify”, according to Joerg Rocholl, Professor of Finance and holder of the Ernst and Young Chair in Governance and Compliance at ESMT.
In an article on July 28th in the Wall Street Journal’s “The Source” blog, David Cottle comments that the rise in July of another major indicator, BNP Paribas’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), was led by Germany. The PMI is an indicator of economic activity and reflects the percentage of purchasing managers in a certain economic sector reporting better business conditions than in the previous month. “This supports our long-held view that we will continue to see a two-speed euro area, with notable outperformance by countries like Germany, which continues to benefit from the strength of its manufacturing sector,” said BNP. This latest data shows that Germany is again assuming its traditional role of being the ‘locomotive’ of economic growth in Europe.
All in all, this is great news for business school students and graduates who are looking to study or work in Germany. At present the job market for highly qualified workforce seems to be very tight, working in favour of business school graduates with solid professional experience.
At ESMT European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, over 90% of MBA students who graduated in December 2009 were in employment by March 2010. Over 60% of these graduates found employment in Germany.
The graduates also benefited from ESMT`s powerful company network. The school was founded by 25 major German global players such as Allianz, E.ON, Deutsche Bank, Lufthansa and Siemens.
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CSR, sustainability and corporate ethics are all big buzzwords for the current generation of MBA candidates. But how can they turn their beliefs into becoming globally responsible leaders, in touch with the three Ps of modern business, People, Planet and Profit. Take a look here.
What is the GMAT AWA (Analytical Writing Assessment)? How does it function and how can you ace it? Good article found here.
A recent survey answer about “preferred MBA course length” suggests that… well, I’m not going to say just yet, but it produced an interesting answer. So here’s the question for you:
What’s the ideal length of an MBA course for you? Perhaps you’re applying for one, have competed one and thought that it was too long, too short, just right?
A survey conducted by the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) has found that MBA graduate starting salaries in the US are not being cut, despite the global economic downturn. Noting the findings, GMAC, the organization responsible for the GMAT entrance test for business schools pointed out that salary cuts would have been a more likely outcome, considering the economic climate.
Read more here.
Dave Wilson, President of GMAC, who run the GMAT, responds to the question as to why they have introduced a new section to the GMAT: “We surveyed faculty. They told us [about MBA candidates with the current GMAT] ‘we know they’ve got the skills in quant and the skills in verbal, but what we don’t know is whether they are able to analyse, to assimilate, to convert data, to assess whether or not it’s valid, to interpret it, to draw inferences. If you could ever come up with questions that were really microcosms of what goes on in the MBA classroom, that would help us in determining whether the candidate will thrive in our classroom.’ So we took that and have created an Integrative Reasoning section to the GMAT that will require candidates to look at data in multiple formats.” See video here.
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