Introduction At Strathclyde we think it's very important that you should have a clear understanding about some of the reasons why you might consider doing an MBA. It's also important that when you're considering doing an MBA you choose the right one for your own purposes. First of all let me just say a little bit about why most of our people do an MBA. The main reason of course is that most people would like to become a better manager. Now that's important because it's not just to do with getting three letters after your name, indeed these days having three letters, MBA, after your name does not open doors to an incredibly new and distinct career. Rather, it provides you with an education that enables you to become a better manager, and therefore get career progression. But every year when I ask our MBA graduates what they think they're getting from an MBA, and what they might expect to get, and also when I talk to those who graduated three or four years ago and ask them the same question, the answers I will generally get are first of all that they are able to grasp the whole of the business rather than just be a specialist. Secondly, they feel that they are no longer isolated in their own singular profession. And I suppose one of the practical things they get from it is the feeling that they are not likely to be hoodwinked by other experts any longer. And that is important. And so those things taken together obviously do, in most instances, provide career progression. ??? specialists who wish to broaden their career horizons therefore is one of the good reasons for undertaking an MBA. Other good reasons are that you are keen to realise your own potential by broadening your intellectual base and your managerial competence base. Thirdly it's necessary often to obtain a senior management position in a lot of organisations. When I talk to chief executives of large corporations, they usually will argue that they can make, or should be able to make a presumption that anybody who is entering their senior ranks does have an MBA, and indeed when they discover that they haven't got an MBA they would just expect them to go and do one fast. Fourthly, it is, of course, some sort of insurance policy. It does tend to improve job security and employability. However, the last two things I'd mention are probably the things that are most memorable for most MBA graduates. The first one of these is that it increases significantly self competence, and that is important in terms of career progression. And secondly it increases your opportunities for networking in the future. Generally speaking, when you undertake an MBA you spend a lot of your time on the MBA working and learning from other colleagues who have got good experience. Those people become friends for life, and they become a part of your network for increasing your own career potential as you move forward into the future. What is an MBA? So let me just say a little bit about what an MBA is. First of all, it's a trans-disciplinary activity. It demands therefore working with both the soft and the harder aspects of the disciplines of management. It will cover the basics - statistics, finance, accounting, marketing, operations management, human resources and of course strategic management. It usually involves some significant applied project, indeed all of the properly accredited MBAs will have a project as an important part of the MBA qualification. Typically an MBA will be the equivalent of one year's study, but it's one year of really hard graft, because it's a twelve month study period, not the normal academic year that most of us are associated with. However, what that means for somebody who's doing it part time is that it will typically be 2-3 years of part time activity, part time study. In our own case of Strathclyde we find that most people who undertake it on a part time basis tend to take two and a quarter to two and a half years to complete their studies. Usually it is designed to build on your experience, to help you make sense of that experience, try to bring some sense and order to that experience, which means of course that an MBA is a post-experience qualification, and typically MBA students are in their 30s, on average. I'll come to that again a little bit later though. Finally it increases the probability of you making better decisions, that's perhaps the best way of actually thinking about an MBA. Because it's about management and management is still as much an art as it is a science, all we're doing is not expecting to give you the right answers in your education, but increase the probability of you making and coming to the right conclusions in your managerial life. Key Issues Let me turn now to the key issues when you come to choose an MBA programme, anywhere in the world. First of all you need to make a decision about whether you want to do a generalist or a specialist MBA. There are some of both around the world. Secondly, think very hard about the nature of the cohort, in other words the people you'll be studying with. They are a critical part of what you will get out of an MBA. Thirdly, think about accreditation, the accreditation of the programme, the accreditation of the business school you intend to undertake the study in. Fourthly, you need to think a little bit about rankings, how does the MBA you are thinking of undertaking rate in the key rankings. Next, the quality of the teaching staff, in the end what you get from an MBA depends fundamentally upon how good they are at actually turning theory into practice, of telling you good stories about the theories work in practice, which means that you need staff who have got good industrial experience. Next, think about the design of the programme, how it fits together, how it's been designed, how carefully it was designed, and also the support you will get in actually enabling that design to work. And finally, think carefully about the amount of investment you're making. What I mean by that is don't just think about the fees, think about the total cost of the programme. Fees tend to be a very small part, and the last thing you want to do is actually spend a lot of your life, a couple of years possibly, spending a lot of time and energy, achieving very little simply because you didn't pay enough attention to the quality of the programme and paid too much attention to a low cost of the programme. So let me just consider that last one a little bit more, in a little bit more detail. Programme Fees MBA study is expensive. First of all, of course, there are the fees, and they can range anything from £5,000 sterling right the way up to, in the case of London Business School, £80,000 for a two year programme. That's a lot of money, whichever way you look at it. Secondly, you're going to need some money for materials, that's the books and all of the other materials you'll need to make the study work for you. But perhaps the biggest cost to you in terms of investment is the opportunity cost of the time you spend. If you're studying it full time it's a year out of your career, and that's costly. If you're studying it part time it's a lot of evenings and a lot of weekends gone, and there's a bit opportunity cost in terms of the cost to your family and your partner. And finally of course there's the living costs. If you're going to undertake a full time programme then you've got to live in the city you choose to undertake the programme. Obviously it's more expensive to live in a city like London or Paris or New York than it is to live in, let's say, Lancaster or Glasgow or Edinburgh or other cities of that nature. Think about that as a part of the cost. Also consider, when you're thinking about the investment, the impact it's going to have on your career. It does depend, as I said earlier, not just upon getting an MBA just three letters but on you as a whole person. You have, at your age, with your experience, unique experience and a unique background and when you finish the MBA you are still that same person with a unique experience and a unique background but now with an MBA, so don't forget the impact of that unique experience and background on your future. General or Specialist? Generally an MBA is designed to focus upon general management and give you a breadth of understanding. However, there are some MBA programmes that do offer specialisms. Typically these are options where you choose or elect to take particular aspects towards the end of your MBA rather than other aspects. And that's the best way of thinking of it. If you are offered a specialist MBA which is specialist from the outset then it is not in the tradition of a Masters in Business Administration. Think carefully about that. Which means, of course, that you do need to think quite carefully about the role and choice of electives and the choice of project. Electives are often an opportunity to specialise, also of course a project is something that you choose for yourself. You might undertake it in a group but sometimes a group project can still be a specialist project. So as the MBA unfolds, what you'll find is that towards the end of the MBA you naturally, even in a general MBA, will have a chance to specialise in those things that of particular interest, without then finishing up with a specialist MBA that has been specialist throughout. My own experience of working with MBAs over twenty years has been that most MBA students, when they undertake the MBA at the outset, are less certain than you might expect about where they want to specialise. Indeed, as they undertake their studies, their interests shift and change, sometimes in quite fundamental ways. Quite often we will find that somebody who has undertaken and MBA with an intention of increasing their chances in private industry gradually shift their attention towards public sector not for profit, and of course vice versa. That happens more often than you might think, and it might happen to you, so do take care about making a decision to specialise too early on during your programme. Study Options Next, what about the decision about whether to do it part time, full time or, indeed, by distance learning? Part time is perhaps the best way of undertaking an MBA because it gives you a chance, in a sense, to test drive the concepts, theories and ideas and techniques that are coming out of your education. You can actually go back after an evening or a weekend and try some of these things out. You can come back to the staff and query why it is that the ideas don't seem to be working in your own head or in practice, and actually continue with a conversation which is developmental and enables you to move things forward. Also, a part time programme gives you a bite size way of undertaking a programme. If you're doing it a bit at a time. With a lot of part time programmes there is an increased opportunity now to undertake the part time programme on a more flexible basis, which means that instead of just doing it on a regular basis, let's say, every evening a week or over a weekend, you can mix and match. That can be a significant advantage. However, there is one big disadvantage to undertaking it part time, and that is the risk of completion is higher, or the risk of not completing is higher than it would be on a full time programme. On a full time programme you tend to lock yourself into the programme for a whole year and will therefore tend to complete it. The chances of dropping out on a part time basis are higher. So what about the advantages of doing it full time. Well, full time does give you fast completion, you will usually complete within a year with a much lower risk of not completing. It is of course though, at the same time, as I said earlier, a greater expense, particularly the opportunity cost of actually losing your career for a year. There's also a risk of becoming a student in the worst sense of that word, that is you lose touch with your organisation, you lose touch with the organisational life and actually just get wrapped up in being a student in a university and that can be dangerous. So what about distance learning? Well, distance learning has a number of disadvantages. It has no groupwork typically and groupwork is fundamental to organisational life, so losing that as a part of your education can be very significant. There's no group interaction, no debate, no networking - that's difficult. There's no learning in practice, no rehearsal, no chance to try things out. So what's the advantage of distance learning? Well, the only advantage really is that you can do it at a distance, exactly what the words say, it is a distance learning activity. It's a poor substitute for good learning for an MBA. The Cohort The people you undertake an MBA with matters enormously. You will get probably 50% of your learning from your colleagues on the MBA. That's important. It does mean therefore if you're going to get a lot of learning from them, it matters who you're studying with. When you are thinking about undertaking an MBA ask serious questions about the profile of cohort in the past. The questions to ask are what is the age profile? Typically you might expect the profile for an MBA programme to show an average age of somewhere between 28 and 34. The older the average age the better usually. Secondly what's the experience profile? In other words are you going to spend your time with a mix of different people from different industries and from different types of organisations. They will each bring something different to the table, will bring a different learning opportunity for yourself. So firstly, what's the average age, what's the distribution of age on the programme, what's the experience profile? Accreditation Accreditation. Probably the most significant criteria you should employ. There are three accreditation agencies for MBAs that matter, who take their job very very seriously indeed, and when I say that what I mean is that in the first instance you have to signal your interest in being accredited by the accreditation agency and at that stage they may well reject you at that level of interest. Often 40% of those who apply for accreditation, just put their hand up indicating their interest in it, get rejected. The second stage is a very significant submission that you have to make to demonstrate that you qualify for accreditation - you could fail at that stage. If you pass that second stage then the accreditation agency will bring a body of people across to inspect you, sometimes over three to four days. What they will do is investigate all of your materials, your facilities, the teaching staff, they'll talk to alumni, they'll talk to students and they'll talk to employers. And that's the case with each of the three major accreditation agencies. The first is the North American-based one, AACSB. That matters because it gives a North American credibility. Secondly is the European accreditation agency EQUIS, that gives the European stamp of approval. And thirdly of course you are interested in undertaking an MBA; the Association of MBAs is an international body, although based in the UK, and that's the only serious accreditation agency that matters for an MBA. So if you're thinking about doing an MBA you most certainly should insist upon doing an MBA that has AMBA accreditation. You could take the next two steps, go to EQUIS and AACSB. Of course the best is to get an MBA from a school that has triple accreditation, accreditation by all three agencies. That gives you full international accreditation, probably the most significant quality test of any MBA that you might consider doing. Rankings A lot of people talk about the rankings. So what does that mean? Well of course first of all a lot of people use it as a very simple gate, in other words if a school is not in the rankings then don't bother to consider going there. It's a simple way of making a decision, but it may not be appropriate for your own circumstances. There are only three rankings that matter in our business. The first is the Financial Times ranking, the second The Economist and the third Business Week. But there are significant issues. Each of them have their own methodologies of bringing out a ranking of business schools, so when you're looking at rankings take a very great deal of attention to look at the measures that are used. Quite often there are measures which use salary as a surrogate for quality of the education, in other words the impact upon the type of education you might get to become a better manager. However, of course, if you're using money or salary as a surrogate variable then you are more likely to get a higher salary depending upon your position in the world, the city that you are likely to get a job in (so you are certainly in the United Kingdom for example likely to get a higher salary in London than you are in Birmingham). These things matter and the rankings will have been influenced by the extent to which a business school is turning out MBA students who are going to get a job in the more expensive to live cities. So think quite carefully about the methodology that's used, think about whether it's a consistent methodology. So look from one year to the next. If a school has jumped around a lot then the rankings are probably not a good indicator. If schools jump around a lot in general then probably the methodology is unreliable. So think carefully about those aspects. Also pay attention to whether the ranking methodology includes some way of auditing the submissions that are made by business schools. Business schools are in business, and they're in business to influence rankings so they will obviously seek to influence them in whatever way they can, and the need for some extent of audit becomes very significant. The only one of those three rankings that does a serious audit is the Financial Times. Teaching Staff An important criteria I mentioned earlier was the quality of the teaching staff. First of all be very aware of the difference between the staff that are advertised in a brochure to be teaching you and the staff that will actually teach you. If you are going to an institution to consider doing an MBA ask very clearly a question which relates to who is actually going to teach you. Unfortunately there are some business schools that will advertise top flight staff in their brochures but you will see nothing of them during your education. Pay very clear attention to that requirement that you want to be educated by top flight people. Also beware of the use of what are known as adjunct staff. These are staff who are not actually employed by the university concerned but are people who are indirectly employed by paying them just for bits and pieces of teaching they do. They'll not be a part of the collegiate basis of the institution, they won't understand the whole process of MBA education, they can sometimes also be bad teachers. Secondly, ask about the extent to which the staff who are going to teach you have some serious practice in relation to the theories they are going to talk to you about. In other words are they engaged with industry, are they engaged at a senior level and are they engaged actually working with the material that they will be teaching on the MBA. So the age, experience and the expert consulting that staff undertake will matter. Younger staff inevitably won't have good solid experience of being able to use the theories in practice. In a lot of cases you might also ask whether they've had time as managers themselves, what industrial experience they have, directly. That might be relevant. Thirdly, are they up to date? To what extent are they engaged currently in consulting activities which are not just engaging in everyday consulting but are actually moving their own field of study forward. And associated with that I guess is also, of course, the research profile of the staff on the programme. To what extent are they publishing in peer review journals, in the top journals? To what extent do they have best paper awards, to what extent are they well qualified themselves, in other words, how many of the staff who are going to teach you do have doctorates and have a good research profile? Those are questions that can be very important in trying to make a judgment about the quality of the staff who are going to teach you. Websites One way of making a judgment about the quality of teaching staff is just to check out what is on the website as a first check. When you're looking at MBA on the website you'll often find that you're not told who is actually going to teach you at all. Indeed, often you'll find that you're not even told who the staff are in the business school. You are not able to find out anything about their profile - their research profile, their publications. If that's the case then of course it's important to be a little suspicious about what you're being offered in those circumstances. It's very easy to make a bland and hyped statement about the quality of the staff but not to provide any evidence so look for the evidence. Programme Design Important criteria when selecting an MBA is to consider how well the MBA has been designed. It takes a long time to design a good MBA. There are some people who have been offering an MBA for a lot of time, in other words a large number of years, some who have been doing it for 20, even 30 years. What that means is that they have been able to develop their MBA incrementally and carefully and learn from the experience of doing so. Generally speaking those will be better MBAs. There are some very young MBAs on the market at the moment - those tend to have been developed on what is called a cafeteria approach. That is it's just a package or a menu of different types of activities that are done in any order you like, and indeed on some MBAs you can undertake different parts in any order you like. If that's the case then clearly it's not a developmental MBA. Usually education needs to be done under a very particular and carefully considered order. You do one subject before another for a very good reason in design terms. Secondly think about the extent to which the design of the MBA encourages integration. Management in reality is not marketing or finance or operations. It's usually a combination of all of them. Issues don't appear in nice little packages in organisations, they appear messy, across disciplinary, and across different fields of study. Therefore think about how the MBA you might undertake integrates each of these different subjects. So I've mentioned the extent to which it should be developmental, I think you can see that there is a relationship between the developmental aspects of an MBA and the extent to which it is likely to integrate. Thirdly consider the support that you might get, to what extent will you get access to appropriate books, articles and databases. In undertaking an MBA having that facility as a facility that's devoted to the MBA students in an institution matters. Because you don't need access to a massive library, what you need is access to that which is appropriate for MBA study, and that means access to current databases will be particularly significant. Access to good librarian support will matter, so explore those in some detail. Of course as a part of that support network there is the extent to which you will get adequate web based support, how good is the intranet facility that's devoted to the MBA education? How good is the alumni network and its relationship to that intranet? The alumni network will be significant for your future. Conclusion Finally it does matter where you get an MBA from. Only Harvard, Wharton, London Business School, INCIAD? are well known enough across the world for you to be sure that your MBA will be able to be followed through with any potential employer knowing where you got it from. Any other employer doesn't really know how to distinguish one school from another. That means that what matters for you, if you're not able to go to one of those top schools and pay top fees, is that you need to know that you're going to get the sort of education that will make you a distinctly better manager, and a better manager that's going to be noticed as a better manager and therefore get the career progression you want. Among the rest of the schools other than those top schools, the well known schools, there are some who are as good, or better, at MBA education. But there are very many that are very poor, and some that are hopeless. Make sure that you don't choose one of those schools to undertake your MBA and to spend a lot of investment, particularly in terms of opportunity cost. If you're going to be clear and make your life easy then at least start from AMBA as the initial accreditation hurdle. If you go beyond that then you can go to AACSB and EQUIS as the next steps. And there are only under 1% of business schools across the world that have got full international accreditation, so that gives you a good lead in and a good gate to use as a starting off point. Whatever else you do, take the decision you make about where to do your MBA very seriously indeed, and of course one of the tests of that is whether the school you are applying to is prepared to be helpful and honest about what they provide and talk to you about what you're looking for and help you make that decision.