We talk a great deal about the advantages of gaining an MBA; how it will increase your salary, give you better career prospects and make you more employable. I had a conversation with a lecturer on an MBA program, and asked him what he thought the advantages that students gained from studying an MBA. His answer rather surprised me; he said that the major advantage that he had observed was that students gained confidence in themselves.
I questioned him further. Surely most MBA candidates had self confidence. He said that although this was true for some candidates, many were looking for ways to give themselves permission to ask for promotion or to be able to justify their applications for better jobs. Gaining an MBA meant that they had proof that they were capable of this kind of step in their career, and therefore they were able to present themselves well and to project their abilities.
Someone asked me the other day what the difference was between a professional degree and an academic degree. I had to think carefully about this, but actually it's quite obvious if you think about who is motivated to study the different kinds of degree.
An MBA is a typical (and probably the original) professional degree. The people who study MBAs are usually working at quite a high level in management, and want to both gain new knowledge and techniques to help them in the work they already do, and they want to be able to use the MBA qualification to strengthen their management resume. They study a number of different subjects and then integrate these in order to apply them to given situations.
An academic degree is usually a graduate qualification that is taken to gain more knowledge in a particular subject area, with greater specialization. Usually acknowledgement is by the academic community, although they are instrumental in gaining certain kinds of employment.
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