BGN Entrepreneur

No copyright exists for the term MBA. In spite of the best efforts of accrediting bodies, the sector’s watchdogs, this world-renowned business education acronlym has, in essence, no real meaning.
Yourself, your neighbor, even your plumber, could assume the title of MBA director and open a program. The content of that program would be entirely up to you, or them. However, there is one aspect of an MBA that can be considered a differentiator, that of experience. Many of the world’s top programs demand that their students have at least five years’ work experience. But there are other program where such experience in not a requirement. Nevertheless, at the end of either type of program the student has the precious letters MBA after his or her name.
I believe that these latter programs, where work experience is to a prerequisite, are damaging the MBA brand and the issue must be addressed if business schools wish to maintain the integrityof their qualification. If they do not, the Master of Business Administration will be transformed into the MBA.
A quick trawl through websites aimed at prospective MBA students shows that the question of candidates’ in-company experience is seldom addressed. It is the resulting riches rather than the pre-program profile requirements that are normally stressed. As a result, the profile of MBA participants can very enormously.
Much is made of the diversity that should be inherent in an MBA class and the experience to be gained by networking within the program with other participants. While this selling point of MBAs holds true for a class where all have spent a period of time in management positions, it starts to ring hollow when pre-experience students cause an imbalance in the mix. It could even be argued that an intake where ages vary from the late 20s to the late 40s would pose fewer problems for both participants and faculty than a class with a much younger age average, but where there is a wide disparity of work experience.
The practice of accepting students with no professional experience on MBA programs exists to a lesser extent at some top US schools or reputable UK universities and to a greater extent at most Indian business schools.
In the case of the US and UK, inexperienced participants form a small minority of an intake and are expected to hold their own with their older classmates, thanks to precocious leadership ability and excellent academic results.
In the case of the Indian market, often it is simply keeping up with demand by providing the domestic recruitment market with young managers. In this way, there is little or no risk that these pre-experience MBAs will further blur the lines of distinction between programs by entering the job market outside their home country.
The matter of MBA becomes thornier when such a program provides managers for multinationals. Here, the young graduates who go on to international careers aged just 25 and with those three magic letters after their names are in the same recruitment market as MBA alumni from schools where hefty professional experience issue is to incorporate internships into course structure, so that students acquire in-company experience during, rather than before, their studies.
However, in a class that includes students without experience, will the participants learn about real managerial challenges from each other? And can the professional experience gleaned as an intern be compared with that gained as a manager with real, long-term responsibilities?
I believe the answer to both questions is No. But, such is the demand for the acronym that opens doors that there will doubtless always be students for whom the meaning of the letters MBA matters far less than being able to add them to their CV.

–By Valerie Claude-Gaudillat, MBA director at Audencia Nantes School of Management

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