Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Is the Executive MBA Program Still a Good Idea Today?

Many students of the EMBA in the old days had their tuition paid for by their organizations, who expected them to stay with them for bigger and better offices after completion of the course. Nowadays, only a few companies are financing employees, which means more and more students getting an executive MBA program are footing the tuition bill themselves. Because of this, according to a top B-school, more are seeking to make a career change, whether during their program study or after graduation.

The demand for the EMBA career program started to pick up about a decade ago. About three or so years ago, more and more people started asking for a career version of the EMBA. A fairly large number of people in a poll answered, when asked what they wanted out of the program, that they wanted to be able to change career directions.

A B-school is basically a layover location now. There are many methods of shifting careers, and a lot of them have been shown by Executive MBA students over the years. The people in the course were thus presented with a fresh service: career counseling from the school.

Almost all EMBA students have considerable work experience – usually 7 to 10 years vs. about only four years for MBA full-timers – and they are working full-time while pursuing EMBA programs. That having been said, many of the students are still asking their academic institutions to provide help in locating the professions of their choice. Quite a lot of people still do say that the colleges could stand to improve their counseling and placement services for the graduates, though.

Now, most business schools provide EMBA students with career counseling services and resume review, which often replaces actual recruiting, and many graduate students are satisfied. There are even those who give specialized individual counseling sessions. The idea is to help the students really find the professions they want.

The number of students seeking assistance is still rising. The problem is that more people are taking the courses and fewer companies looking to hire. This is in fact partly why so many are in the course: they are hoping to network in order to make a career shift easier.

There is still some skepticism over the possibility of corporations ever fully abandoning their employees when it comes to EMBA tuition, so some institutions do not yet go into full-blown career assistance programs. This has changed. Shifting careers is becoming more and more common.

Many things are changing. Changing careers is widely accepted as a possibility for EMBA students, so much so that universities are beginning to institutionalize career services. That being said, you shall have difficulty locating an academy that offers a real career course of the type you would find with a regular MBA.

There is much interest in the idea of having recruiters over the university that could assist people in finding their next jobs. Not all institutions think they should have to go out of their way to provide all the students need. Universities are saying that when the students come into the course holding down a position with a company, there would be little need for placement services.

The argument is that an Executive MBA program is not so much a place where a person can get a new job but rather the means to get a new job if he so desires it. Only a few executive MBA career services directors predict corporate sponsorship making a comeback, but the EMBAs are likely to continue looking for radical career changes. Universities shall simply have to keep up with the times.

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