Online MBA Forum

I've been reading some comments from people who took their MBA some five and more years ago. A couple of them studied online, but more of them were studying in the classroom - as you would expect at that time.

Most of them (around 80%) took an MBA because it was a convenient time in their career, and they felt that it was the best way to progress their career - mostly to upper middle management and above. Age group was mostly in the 30 to 40 bracket, with one man over 40.

The real help that every single person mentioned was the contacts that they made. Not only for business purposes, but also in terms of help and support during and after the program.

There was also a general concensus that the skills and confidence they gained really changed their careers - sometimes literally. Several people said that they gained enough confidence to enable them to contemplate and go ahead with a complete change of career.

Dealing with the joint MBA program, across two cultures has started me thinking about how education affects, and is affected by, the culture that it is sat in. MBA programs were started in the US, and grew out of the development of industry from a production base to a marketing base. Initially engineers, and then finance people ran companies, but as commercial life became more complex, so the need for a more general business education grew and the MBA came into being.

Although today MBAs are offered all over the world, the US has put it's stamp on the qualification. The US culture of self-reliance, of ambition and of good education has formed the basis for all MBA programs, and in a sense it is an ambassidor of western business culture.

This is one of the reasons why other cultures see MBAs as being so vital to their commercial development and why it can be so difficult to transfer an MBA program from one country to another. The difficulties have to be addressed and overcome, otherwise the program becomes meaningless.

My Chinese contact for a joint MBA program is becoming interesting. We have started to talk about assessment and the need for academic rigour. The Chinese approach seems to be that they want to know exactly what each mark is for, and in what circumstances it gets awarded. Our approach is that although marks are awarded for some specific items, there are also marks that can be awarded because of the general quality of the work.

Rules seem all important for the Chinese when they are considering this MBA; an attitude that I found (with a different twist) in Russia. We are much more flexible when we are considering graduate degrees, and the importance for us is to have original work, or work that is done using other academic work as reference, but being able to analyse and synthesize.

We need to hammer out these differences now; if we have these differences with the institution, I can only surmise that the students will be even harder to deal with.