Many executives and young professionals turn to MBAs to boost their business savvy, and HR professionals can play an important role in helping employees select the right MBA. Melissa Yen reports
Many executives and young professionals turn to MBAs to boost their business savvy, and HR professionals can play an important role in helping employees select the right MBA. Melissa Yen reports
Professionals with an MBA title next to their name are doing well these days. On a global scale, a survey by The Financial Times found that the salaries of MBA 2006 alumni have risen across every sector compared to the salaries of those in the 2005 survey.
Inside the business schools, however, there has been concern about falling enrolments in their MBA courses. The schools have responded by revamping their offerings, adding more flexibility for students and taking a more tailored approach to the design of their MBAs. “The best MBA programs are moving to a more cross-disciplinary curriculum, offering their students a much broader range of experiences than just classroom learning,” says Richard Speed, associate dean for faculty resources and ANZ professor of marketing strategy at MelbourneBusinessSchool.
Increasingly, there has been a shift from the theoretical to the practical, with opportunities to study overseas and work with companies on live projects being provided. Speed adds that MBAs are also becoming more flexible with respect to study modes. Recent offerings for programs for senior managers include the delivery of four month-long blocks, spread over fourteen months.
Food for HR thought
Good MBAs are not cheap. Too often, people undertake poor quality, cheap and low impact MBA programs that have had no impact on their career, according to Speed. However, such students often undertake such programs because they are the only ones their employer will support.
“HR professionals have a responsibility to ensure that MBA study is valued, and that shows in actions rather than rhetoric,” he says. Some students claim they work for firms who see leaving for class at 5pm as ‘shirking’, and are denied the opportunity to study the organisation for assignments for confidentiality reasons. Even purposeful acts of scheduling work commitments to clash with exams or study have been identified. Speed describes this as a sure-fire way to lose talent.
“To be serious, HR professionals should be helping their employees select the best MBA programs that they can. The key to that is getting fully informed about the market. Talk to your personnel who are alumni or current students. Talk to your colleagues and your business mentors.”
Speed also cautions against HR professionals relying on word of mouth. “Get out and visit business schools. Ask to meet the faculty, meet the students and sit in on classes.”
MBA benefits
For the employee, an MBA can lead to increased responsibility and job scope, with a corresponding change in job title and salary, Speed believes. It can also lead to better employment opportunities.
“MBAs tend to give their graduates choices that their non-MBA peers don’t have. They have enhanced skills, increased confidence and a dramatically enhanced network of professional contacts,” Speed claims. “For the employer, they have a more valuable employee, with a broader range of skills, who has more alternative employment options because they now have more ways to contribute to their employer’s business.”
However, this sometimes makes retention more challenging. According to Speed it is truly awful business logic to decide that since an MBA increases the risk of losing an employee, MBA study should not be supported. “For the HR professional, working with the employee to ensure that the joint investment in their capability is put to work in a stimulating and valuable way, is probably the biggest and most interesting challenge.”
The alumni take
MBA alumni also believe completing an MBA has broadened their skill and network base, and provided them with increased opportunity and rewards in terms of employment, salary and credibility.
“The main reasons for undertaking the MBA were to broaden my general management knowledge and to provide me with an internationally recognised management qualification that would help me to climb my chosen career ladder,” says Tanya Graham, senior business solutions manager, product and channel transformation at Westpac. “In addition to achieving this, I also gained a solid network of like-minded people in a diverse range of industries and positions that I now use as informal mentors and key contacts for gaining and sharing information. I was able to apply a lot of the theory and course content to work-related situations which enhanced the learning experience by making the courses I was studying more relevant.”
Graham, who obtained her MBA through the Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM), believes that the program has given her a set of skills enabling her to be a more effective communicator. She identifies this in terms of building working relationships and business acumen, which she claims has, in turn, increased her credibility as a business professional.
For Rod de Aboitiz, CFO of Abacus Property Group, studying his executive MBA (EMBA) was a transformational experience. “It helped me to commit to my long-term goal to one day become a business leader as opposed to an audit partner. It provided me with solid strategy grounding, sharper problem solving skills and the leadership insights I needed to take my career forward.”
Since graduating in 2004, de Aboitiz has moved on to become CFO of Rothschild’s Australian operations and is CFO of the listed Abacus Property Group. “I think your peers acknowledge how challenging an MBA is in terms of both the work itself and the way it stretches and grows you personally.”
While combining study with work may seem overwhelming, de Aboitiz says dedication can overcome this and it can even be used to your advantage. “The benefit of doing an MBA while you work means that you can apply it real time. While taking on 10 to 15 hours a week study on top of a 50-hour working week sounds gruelling, you can chip away at it daily. Before work, for instance, worked for me,” he says.
For Graham, time was the only drawback in doing the program, which had an affect on her personal life. The key is to ultimately achieve a balance between studying, working full-time and having some personal time, she says. “The time commitment that is required should not be underestimated if you want to maximise the benefit from the course and this naturally has an impact on your personal life.”
Questions to ask yourself
What is the evidence that this school transforms people?
How do they change as employees, as managers or as people?
How do their employers change?
What do the alumni say about the program?
What is the evidence that this school is professional?
Does it look like a school for business, or is it an undergraduate program pretending to be an MBA?
Would you want to bring your CEO or chair into this school to meet these students?
What is the evidence that this school is personal?
Does this school care about the outcome for that individual, or are they just a face in the crowd?
Spend a lot of time working on the individual performance of key people; you should expect their school to do the same. Look at the size of the classes, the interaction with the faculty, the flexibility and the individual support.
By Richard Speed, associate dean for faculty resources and ANZ professor of marketing strategy, Melbourne Business School
