Will an MBA really help you get ahead?

In today’s business world, will an MBA take your career to the next level? Yes, and here’s why it’s worth the effort and expense.

MBAs – are they worth it?

THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, THE SAYING GOES: THOSE WHO SCOFF AT MBAS AND THOSE WHO HAVE THEM.

Australians view formal management education with an almost unhealthy scepticism. MBA, according to this school of thought, stands for Master of Bugger All and a Mega Big Attitude, while slogging for hours with a group of strangers on some obscure project can lead to a Marriage Break Away.

But as the business world shifts to digital warp speed, global competition gets tougher and the expectation to get agile or automated increases, will a Master of Business Administration help graduates get ahead? With the pressure on all of us to lift our game, will this traditional business toolkit provide a skill set that will keep us in work, boost our bank account and our resilience? And if so, when outlaying a sum roughly equivalent to a minor home renovation, what kind of return on investment (ROI) is it reasonable to expect for the time, energy and money spent?

IN A PRIOR WORLD, YOU MIGHT HAVE GONE TO BED AT NIGHT WONDERING WHO WAS GOING TO TAKE YOUR MARKET SHARE. NOW YOU GO TO BED WONDERING WHICH INNOVATOR IS GOING TO TAKE OUT YOUR INDUSTRY.”

Kyle Loades, president and chairman of motoring and services group NRMA, says that when it comes to ROI, we should be flipping the question. “What’s the cost of not doing an MBA; what’s the cost of

not doing some further study?” he asks. A business entrepreneur who says he didn’t excel at high school, Loades completed his MBA at NSW’s University of Newcastle in 2015. He found it a great experience and hugely beneficial after a number of years in business.

“I’m a real believer that education is essential to ensuring you always remain in employment. You need to continually learn; you’re never too old to learn. The world is changing and education is insurance for your career, with every business potentially going through disruption.”

Associate Professor James Hutchin, Executive MBA program director at the University of Technology Sydney, says that in today’s business world you’re going to be either the disrupter or the disrupted. “In a prior world, you might have gone to bed at night wondering who was going to take your market share. Now you go to bed wondering which innovator is going to take out your industry.”

In his final strategic management project for his MBA, Loades focused on Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review. The project was relevant because the NRMA is experiencing its own shake-up as technology transforms the operating environment. “Almost every industry is going to go through what has happened in the media so there are some good lessons if you take the time to observe,” he says, adding that the definition of stupidity is to keep doing the same thing when the world is changing.

The compelling new Study of Australian Leadership – the first of its kind in two decades – reveals managers and organisations are ill prepared for this challenging world. Many aren’t getting the leadership and management basics right. The survey of 8000 managers across more than 2700 organisations by Melbourne’s Centre for Workplace Leadership found that the higher qualified the leader, the better the organisation’s performance. Yet one in four senior leaders had no qualification beyond high school.

Now more than ever, organisations need a learning and adaptive mindset, says Preeti Bajaj, vice-president of strategy and transformation at Schneider Electric Australia. Bajaj says Australian management tends to be overweight in technical, experiential training. “And we have a tendency to hire for experience, not for an ability to think or have a ‘growth’ or learning mindset,” she says.

Bajaj, who has an MBA from Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology, says the degree is a generalist qualification that trains you to think across multiple business dimensions and provides a transferable skill set. But, she argues, “we need to challenge the content schools are teaching and ensure that executive teams contain a mix of people and perspectives.”

The reimagining of business education for the future is a live debate. John Toohey, co-founder of AdjunctFinder. com and a former business-school head at Victoria’s RMIT University, says innovation in this space tends to be slow. He believes, at the very least, schools should be incorporating the latest neuroscience and integrating ethics and entrepreneurship.