Education plays a vital role in your life. Besides providing you with the means to make money and have a standing in society, it also shapes your personality. Your education is not merely a degree that is appended to your name. It is rather an integral part of your personality.
Your personality is a derivative of your education.Your persona depends largely on the field of education you come from. Your educational background has a great influence on your personality. That explains why engineers are analytical, those from the management sector are strategic, those from the creative field are innovative and those in the fields of Math, logistics and programming have problem-solving skills. True, not all individuals coming from a certain field possess all the personality traits that are believed to be inculcated by that type of education. But, people coming from similar educational backgrounds share certain characteristics that they attribute to their education.
Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a master’s degree in business administration that has achieved worldwide recognition. It attracts individuals from a variety of academic domains aspiring for a leap in their careers. This degree in business administration was derived from the idea of applying a scientific approach to management. MBA is a challenging educational programme that instills basic business management principles in students. The pursuit of an MBA degree is beneficial in several ways.Let us look at the most significant advantages of earning an MBA.
Benefits of an MBA Degree
MBA programmes expose you to a wide range of subjects like economics, accounting, finance, marketing, operations management, supply chain management, organisational behaviour and project management. After covering a breadth of subjects in your first year of study,you are given an opportunity to specialise in the subject of your choice.
As a part of the degree programme, you are also exposed to the international business. An MBA degree helps you in advancing your career and can lead to a career change. Earning an MBA degree prepares you for management level positions in the industry and gives you greater marketability. It amplifies your resume and paves a path for your professional growth.
The training programmes that are part of the MBA degree course help in the enhancement of leadership skills. The projects, group assignments and presentations help you in acquiring the skills of handling business situations. MBA programmes offer you an opportunity to lead teams, gain knowledge of business leadership and be an influential leader.The group assignments and projects in an MBA programme help you in acquiring the principles of teamwork and collaborative effort. You learn to work together and share both successes and failures with your team. An MBA provides you with a strong network of business professionals and helps you build long-term professional relations.
An MBA degree goes a long way in helping you develop business expertise and start your own business. A large number of students, who pursue an MBA, eventually start a business of their own.Although, an MBA is not a prerequisite in being a business entrepreneur, it definitely provides an added advantage to your business.It equips you with entrepreneurial skills and gives you a deep knowledge of business operations in the corporate world. MBA is widely cognised as a passport to a successful career. Do you plan to acquire it? For many executives doing an MBA is the equivalent of the “get out of jail free” card in Monopoly – a way of ducking out of the recession at its peak and, hopefully, coming back refreshed, re-skilled and even more employable just as things start to pick up.But, with everyone else thinking the same thing, does it still make sense to do the goldstandard management qualification under your belt? Certainly, business schools on both sides of the Atlantic have been reporting surging interest from managers keen to get their heads down and do an MBA. In a recent survey of more than 500 MBA programmes by the Graduate Management Admission Council, for example, more than three quarters said they were seeing a rise in applications from potential students,compared with less than two thirds in a similar survey last year.Top U.S schools such as Harvard Business School, Sloan at MIT and Kellogg at Northwestern University have all reported double-digit rises in applications. In the UK, it’s a similar picture,with many schools reporting a sharp rise in applications, especially for full-time courses,indicating that it is perhaps often managers who have been thrown out of work who are using their redundancy pay-out to take the plunge.Yet, at the same time, there is also some evidence that executive MBA programmes are suffering as companies become less willing to spend money sponsoring employees through programmes or to release them to study block courses. And this understandable emphasis by struggling employers on wanting to keep talent on the front-line is prompting business schools .
To take ever more innovative approaches to wooing people on to their programmes For example, Boston’s Hult International Business had launched a taster “Pocket MBA”,in a move that it claims is a world first. The Pocket MBA will consist of a series of short,intensive seminars over two days later this month on how to manage during the global downturn, at the end of which attendees get a certificate.
The school’s Dr Stephen Hodges said: “We want to give professionals and companies a taste of our top-ranked one-year MBA programme in an abbreviated format, while offering them a chance to gain valuable insights they can apply immediately to their own companies.”At the same time, Rotterdam School of Management has cut its 15-month full-time MBA to 12 months to allow its graduates to get back to work that much more quickly. Dianne Bevelander, associate dean of MBA programmes at the school, said: “RSM MBAs are known to thrive in any setting and to outperform given even the toughest challenges. This 12-month programme will continue to produce outstanding MBAs for which RSM is renowned, but in a shorter time so as to meet the changing needs of markets and employers.” Another sign of apparent cost-cutting by business schools is the decision by Audencia in Nantes,HHL in Leipzig and MIP in Milan to merge their careers advice, corporate relations and placement programmes.The move, presented as means of sharing a “spirit of openness and responsibility” between the schools, will see the three schools acting as one on their pre-programme activities as well as their post-programme and alumni activities.
The underlying question within all this, of course – and one where the answer is still by no means clear – is whether this influx of MBA graduates, when it subsequently spills out on to the jobs’ market in a year’s time, will lead to a dilution of the MBA gold-standard brand. After all, if everyone has one, surely it isn’t special anymore? Better Technology Scene: A bookstore Customer: Can you help me find a book? Me: Of course. Do you know the author or title? Customer: Well, I was at the beach and I saw this girl reading a purple book. She looked like she was really enjoying it. I want that book.Me: Ma'am, you're going to have to be more specific. There are a lot of books with purple covers.Customer: Can't you search on your computer for purple books? Me: Unfortunately, no.Customer: In that case, I'll take my business to a bookstore that has better computers.