Canadians drawn to overseas programs
International experience, shorter timelines are key
What’s a guy to do when he’s turned 60, his kids have grown up and left the nest and he’s not playing with his grandchildren? Start an airline? “Hopefully,” says Abdellatif Issahaku, on the phone from Montreal. He chuckles, but that’s not because he’s joking.
“It would fly between Canada and Morocco, my native country, just carrying people from A to B. What an airline should be, with minimum fees.”
The sky’s not quite the limit for Issahaku. He’s also planning an airline operations school “for dispatching and flight planning. Three months training for about 50 people a year.
“It’s been a long project of mine to do an MBA and now I want to put it to good use.”
He’s one of a growing number of Canadians choosing to do their advanced business studies overseas. They come from all walks of life and have all sorts of reasons.
Issahaku did a “very concentrated” 13month course at Nyenrode Business Universiteit in the Netherlands.
Melissa Langeman, of Niagara Falls, chose Vlerick Leuven Ghent Management School in Leuven, Belgium.
Langemann, 30, with an undergrad degree in anthropology from the U of T, is halfway through a year-long program that she hopes will “help me put my experience in perspective, especially with an international outlook.
“I’d reached a point in my career where I kind of felt a few skills and insights were missing. I was reaching a bit of a wall.” Many Canadian MBA programs take two years. “I felt that was a long time, so I was looking for a 12- or 15-month course,” she says. “And I wanted something in Europe that would give me some hands-on experience.”
After leaving the U of T, Langeman worked in software development, including in India.
Her program in Belgium, like Issahaku’s in the Netherlands, is taught in English. The 64 students in her class are of 33 nationalities. The three dozen students in Issahaku’s class were, he says, “from 16 or 17 countries.”
“We do a lot of work in small groups,” says Langemann. “You have to learn to work with each and every person. That, in itself, is good experience. It was a bit rocky at first, but we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well. It’s incredible now, a lot of fun.
“The school has a completely different outlook than most. Less individualism, for instance. They have something that I believe Harvard might be adopting — a giving-something-back project. You do an in-company as part of this course, but it also involves six weeks of intensive work with a not-for-profit organization or an NGO. They’re growing in importance as business environments.
“In April, there’s a two-week business trip to China. That’s going to be interesting.”
Asia and the Pacific Rim are hugely important in the business world. That’s one reason why Regina native Trevor Flory did his MBA at the Melbourne Business School in Australia. The other was his partner, Nicole Purtell, who is Australian and was about to do a law degree. They met when Purtell was in Canada on a year-long exchange scheme.
“We researched schools in Canada, the U.S. and a little bit in Europe,” says Flory from his home in Melbourne. “The schools in Melbourne were fantastic and made more sense than, say, Vancouver, Kingston or Montreal.
“Eighty per cent of the people in my intake at MBS were international. It was an 18month program very focused on international studies and tied to the whole of southeast Asia and China; much more so than most North American schools.”
Flory has an undergrad degree in commerce from the University of Saskatchewan. He works in property consulting in Melbourne, but thinks he and Purtell may return to Canada in a few years.
Langemann says she’ll be looking for management-consulting work with “a boutique firm in the technology area. The large ones have the reputations, but I want to be handson and more broad in perspective.
“In Canada? I don’t know. I’m pretty open. I’ve had dreams of traveling a bit while I’m in Leuven, but . . . pressure of work; it’s not possible. Okay, it is possible, but irresponsible.”
It’s a disadvantage of a shorter, more intense When it comes to furthering their business educations, Canadians seem to want either to stay close to home or get right away. According to the MBA Tour, an independent information source for MBA admissions, there has been a growing trend for Canadians to study outside the country. And the numbers wishing to stay within their province remains stable but the proportion of students wanting to study elsewhere in Canada has fallen). The most popular overseas study destinations are the U.S., Britain and France. Quebec has the lowest proportion of students wanting to stay there. More than half choose to study outside Canada. The proportion of Ontarians hoping to study abroad has risen from 27 per cent in 2006 to 30 per cent in 2010. Ontario represents about 61 per cent of the market. program. Nyenrode is close to both Amsterdam and Utrecht, but Issahaku says he lived on campus and managed only once to get into Amsterdam for a drink with friends “and then I felt guilty.”
Although he’s a lawyer with wide-ranging experience in the airline industry and also United Nations projects in the Middle East and Africa, Issahaku counts himself lucky to have found a school that would accept an MBA application from a 59-year-old.
“Nyenrode is an amazing place,” he says. “There were less than 200 students, so they can be very flexible. A lot of places wouldn’t have looked at me to do an MBA at this time of my life. But I knew I needed it to do what I’m planning now.”