THE ABC OF THE MBA
THE MBA has enjoyed enduring prestige – while also attracting criticism – since first being offered at Harvard Business School in 1908. The master’s degree is a toolkit that covers accounting, financial analysis, statistics, economics, organisational behaviour, marketing and competitive environment analysis – theoretically, everything you need to run a business.
Australia has more than 40 different MBA programs, which can cost anything from $22,000 to almost $100,000 at an elite university with all the accreditations and a PhDqualified faculty. You can learn via your laptop, without class time or exams, through the increasingly popular online MBAs; tough it out with a cohort of study buddies and PhD-qualified experts over a couple of years; or pay the big bucks to study at elite institutions around the globe such as INSEAD, Tuck, London Business School, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Booth, Columbia and MIT Sloan.
And with a couple of generations of managers strong on experience but lacking the formal qualifications to get ahead, according to industry research and Get Qualified Australia (GQA), demand is growing for pathways that give recognition of prior learning. GQA, a specialist in this area, has seen interest surge in MBAs. But students cite time and cost as the biggest barriers to study, says the company. With demand for education increasing but attention spans decreasing and not everyone keen to sacrifice years of fullor part-time study to expand their brain, there’s a call for short cuts.
This year, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) launched a one-year MBA in Entrepreneurship, which includes certificates in venture funding, commercialisation and entrepreneurship. “We’re trying to teach those agility skills,” says Associate Professor James Hutchin from UTS. “Our approach is to make the teaching as experiential as possible.”
The aim is for students to go in with an idea, learn business foundations and use experiential learning to apply the theory. By the time they graduate, they should have a business plan for their idea.
As for cost, an investment in education might be timely ahead of home improvements, says Hutchin. “I don’t think a bubble in the education space for entrepreneurship is coming any time soon.”
YOU NEED TO CONTINUALLY LEARN; YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD TO LEARN.”