One impact of COVID-19 lockdown is that many managers have taken the opportunity to re-assess their career plans to go for further studies. An executive MBA can be the way forward, says Dr Gary Stockport, Dean EMBA and Professor Strategy at SP Jain School of Global Management
What is an Executive MBA (E-MBA)?
It is a generalist management qualification which has the goal to develop strong all-round managerial capability. Its purpose is to provide a platform of knowledge, skills and competencies to help craft future leaders. Intertwined with all this is both career acceleration and career adaption. Typically, an E-MBA is for mid-career working professionals with at least three-five years management experience. However, many bring 10-plus year experience into the classroom. An E-MBA provides a huge and rich learning opportunity for sharing and learning with like-minded working professionals. Also, the networking impact might prove to be enormously beneficial.
The course offered by us is a structured sequence of courses organised in stages. This includes: Basics (the essentials) of management like Management Accounting, Corporate Finance and Marketing Management; Cross-functional management including courses such as Strategic Innovation and Business Strategy; Electives including the opportunity to specialise in areas lime Finance, Marketing and Operations and doing an Applied Business Project, typically towards the end. This structure enables a student to wear many hats.
The E-MBA courses have increasing realised that building soft skills are critically important for effective managers and future leaders. Softer skills includes everything from listening more attentively, emotional intelligence, building resilience and grit, to making an effective sales presentation. Soft skills are built into an E-MBA through a course like Personal Effectiveness or through offering specialist workshops.
What is the duration?
It usually takes 18-24 month to complete and can cost approximately Rs 15-16 lakh per annum. It is a part-time qualification with students still working full-time. It is offered in a face-to-face mode within a traditional classroom learning environment, via online and or a combination of the two in some sort of a mixed blended learning format. As technology continues to improve a virtual classroom has increasingly and more efficiently been brought into a person’s home or workspace.
Who are the people/sectors that can benefit from this course?
The batch is usually very diverse in terms of the people attending including work experience. An E-MBA appeals to persons who have an engineering background and want to move to a more generalist position.
The goal of doing an E-MBA is to help both career acceleration and career adaption. This includes the ability to speed up a manager’s career trajectory as well as seize transforming career opportunities as they come along.
Over a longer period of time, persons armed with an E-MBA have reached CEO positions. It has also been noted that doing an E-MBA gives confidence to people start their own venture and subsequently growing them into a substantial size through building a scalable business model. Therefore, it has be concluded that calculating the return on investment on the initial fee and time spent studying could well prove to be infinite! It’s not the cost that is important but the return.
