Fine-tuning your professional skills may be your best bet to retain a position or get a promotion. If you are a middle to senior manager with 10 to 15 years of managerial experience, the executive masters of business administration (EMBA) is for you.
Unlike the specific MBA, where students choose a particular specialization in business administration, the EMBA covers a wider range of skills, and does not explicitly focus on one issue. Instead, the EMBA provides executives with the breadth and depth of business management skills they need to boost their career. MBA programs are full-time programs, whereas EMBA degrees offer more flexible scheduling. Once an individual has reached a senior management position, they have the ability to take a few working days off to travel and focus on their studies every month, especially since companies are aware of the benefits its employees are gaining. Completing an EMBA gives executives significant leverage over their peers and competitors. Candidates for the EMBA are fast-paced, hard-working individuals, who are unquestionably devoted to their careers.
Outside of the United States, the EMBA is quite a new concept; it has only appeared in the rest of the world within the last decade. The American University of Beirut (AUB) introduced its EMBA program in February 2004, and has since graduated 90 executive students. International programs, such as the London Business School and INSEAD — both of which opened campuses in Dubai — have larger clusters of students, as these programs have been around slightly longer. The limited awareness of EMBA programs is starting to change, as more globally renowned institutions are transplanting their programs into the Middle East while regional universities are starting to pick up the pace.
Top 20 international EMBA schools
Source: BusinessWeek
Do you fit the profile?
EMBA students in the region and around the world are largely mid-level executives who are ready to climb the next rung on the ladder, and senior executives wanting to sharpen their skills.
Edward Buckingham, director of EMBA programs at INSEAD, outlines the different kinds of individuals who frequently participate in an EMBA. First, there are the specialists. This group includes doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, architects and the like, who have already matured in their specific careers. At some point, these specialists become so good at their job that they are asked to lead a department.
“Very often, [specialists] haven’t had the chance to do an MBA earlier, so they need the training to take on more responsibilities,” say Buckingham.
Riad Dimechkie, director of the EMBA program at AUB’s Olayan School of Business, says experts are those seeking to widen the scope of their business knowledge.
“[These students] are often functional experts, so they have expertise in sales, accounting, information technology and they want more breadth, they want to know something about the more functional areas so that they can deal with them at a strategic level,” he says. “Or, they are getting ready to be promoted and want to learn about the functions they don’t know about firsthand.”
Dimechkie notes the specialists joining an EMBA program bring a lot of industry knowledge with them, whether it be in banking, law, finance or other major industries.
“They already have another career but they want to understand more about businesses with which they have some kind of relationship,” he says. “[For example,] if a lawyer deals with business people, they will want to have a better sense of business strategy and business accounting. Medical doctors may want to start up their own practice, or have shares in a business they want to oversee.”
The second group of EMBA students, according to Buckingham, are entrepreneurs. Such individuals have built-up their own company within the last five to 10 years and did not have the time to do a full-time MBA program.
“They shoulder an enormous amount of responsibility for their organization and community,” he says. This group also includes owners of small and medium-sized enterprises and family-owned businesses.
Dimechkie and Buckingham similarly highlight a final group of executive students, known as ‘the generalists.’ According to Dimechkie, this group is usually made up of general managers (GMs).
“These could be people who inherited a business or who were promoted to being a GM. All of a sudden they’re going from a GM to dealing with lawyers, bankers, insurance, hiring people, etc… so they too need the breadth,” he says. “They also need more depth, because many of them come from non-business backgrounds and they are tired of managing by trial and error and want some fundamental analytical tools, conceptual frameworks, and more to better make decisions and most importantly, to be more confident in the decisions they make.”
Buckingham says generalists are often managers in multinational corporations or large companies.
“They have a lot of social capital within their company, around five to 10 years of experience within the same company. They are committed to a path and want to develop themselves,” he says.
Many specialists need E.M.B.A. training to take on more responsibility in their careers
The learning curve
EMBA programs around the region allow participants to engage with one another in safe surroundings. Executive students are given the opportunity to test business ideas, concepts, frameworks, proposals and strategies with their classmates who come from a variety of cultural and career backgrounds. The classroom enables executives to interact with one another and experiment with different ideas without feeling insecure, says Dimechkie.
“Executives get to really enjoy the opportunity to share and bounce their ideas off of other people with similar or different backgrounds, because it’s a safe environment,” he says. “They don’t get the chance to do that in their own company, as they’re afraid to take chances because they want to be consistent with past behavior patterns or because they don’t want to be judged.”
Kevin Dunseath, director of the EMBA program at London Business School in Dubai, believes that executive students learn an unparalleled amount of information during the course.
“Our students will learn at least as much from one another as they will from the professors,” he says. “The professors have around 20 years of teaching experience, but in the class you’re going to have 800 years of combined work experience, from a huge variety of professional backgrounds.”
The dynamics of an EMBA classroom provides an edge for students. Dimechkie says that teachers are the facilitators of learning, as they manage the class without directly lecturing its students.
“The really clever professors are the ones that use the invisible hand; they’re intervening at the right time to push the discussion in a certain direction or to emphasize a point,” he says, adding that EMBA participants acquire knowledge in a different way than young students do.
“Executives learn in a much different way than [undergraduate] students do,” says Dimechkie. “They don’t learn by sitting and listening to lectures. They learn by doing, [just as they’ve been] learning while they’re on the job for the last 20 years. They learn by reflecting on what they’ve done and seeing if it was the right way to do it or not.”
Because students must be employed full-time during the program, what is learned in the classroom can be immediately applied in the workplace.
E.M.B.A. Programs build an extremely powerful, influential and well-connected network of people
Added value
Most EMBA programs meet every three to four weeks, for two to three day block sessions. No matter what program one chooses, classes are extremely diverse as executives fly from all around the world to participate in the top-notch courses. With so much diversity around, executives get to network with each other during and after the program.
“By the end of the program, [participants] would have built up an extremely powerful, influential, very well-connected network of people,” says Dunseath.
Dimechkie also highlights the networking opportunity that EMBA programs create.
“It’s very important for people to [get the chance to network] in the region, because they are the people they’re going to be working and connecting with for the rest of their lives,” he says. “[Executive students] tend to develop very close and strong relationships with each other, and very often go into business ventures together.”
Executives around the world gain a tremendous amount of leverage over their peers in their company, as each month they return to the office from the program with new ideas. Alumni of EMBA programs gain the ability to quickly analyze complex business issues, and quickly make decisions about them. Dimechkie explains the mixture of rigor and relevance common in an EMBA program.
“[The executive students] need the relevance to apply what they’re learning, quickly. The idea is to quickly take those concepts [from class] and struggle and wrestle with them and try to apply them in the real world,” he says.
It is key to note that EMBA programs are not tailor-made to regional issues or economies. The point of such an executive degree is for students to learn and apply knowledge at a global level, thus providing alumni with the most universal and cutting edge business tools around.
Executive students are taught comprehension of overall business functions, from human resources to balancing the organization’s books. EMBA programs also teach leadership skills, demonstrating how to manage large groups from the most senior level.
Corporate sponsorship
Many companies in the world sponsor senior employees seeking an EMBA. Corporations view sponsoring higher education as a retention strategy, with some asking their employees to promise to remain with the company for a certain amount of time upon completion of the corporate sponsored degree.
“Companies use the EMBA as a risk management tool for people to get the training they need and to get feedback on how to progress further,” says INSEAD’s Buckingham.
Since the global financial crisis took hold, many companies simply do not have the means to fund such pricey programs.
“Companies that send people tend to send them less during times of crisis, as one of the first things they want to save is expenses on training,” says Dimechkie. “If a company is laying people off, to turn around and spend $50,000 on one person doesn’t look that great within the company.”
The flipside of the financial turmoil is that it lures eligible candidates to ameliorate their knowledge and skills, and think about returning to education. Since last year, London Business School has witnessed a 20 percent increase in its applications. Still, corporate funding is not always available. Many students pay from their own pockets, if need be.
“One difference that we’ve noticed in the last 12 months is that fewer companies are willing or able to provide corporate sponsorship,” says Dunseath. “But, we are confident that as business confidence builds up in the coming months, we’ll attract more corporate sponsorship again.”
Obstacles for women
Around the MENA region, and the world generally, few women are enrolling in EMBA programs.
“There are fewer women in upper-middle and top management in the Arab world than there are men,” Dimechkie says. “Also, the average age group of participants [in the AUB EMBA] is around 40 years old. At that age, women usually have young families so it’s hard for them to constantly leave and participate in such a rigorous program.”
He wishes there were more women in the program, and like his peers in the region, makes continuous efforts to encourage top female executives to enroll.
“Once, we had 15 percent, which is still way too low… but the program is very expensive for people in [the region], so we’re trying to make a scholarship for women specifically,” he says.
International universities also face this obstacle. Dunseath estimates that only 10 to 20 percent of participants at the London Business School in Dubai are female. Buckingham says the INSEAD program in Beijing has around 27 percent women enrolled, while the Fontainebleau program has a class composition which is approximately 17 percent female.
“We recognize that this is part of a larger problem,” says Buckingham. “It’s difficult for women to balance career and home life. There’s another problem of companies who are not so open minded about hiring women with children, as they’re worried that their loyalties will lie with the family and not the company.”
EMBA programs in the Middle East
Source: Executive Magazine
Movin’ on up
Career advancement is one of the possible rewards upon completion of one’s EMBA. Graduates may receive salary increases, promotions, or may have the pleasure of being headhunted for higher positions in another company. It’s a two-way street though; Dimechkie says just because a EMBA candidate has been “in a pressure cooker for 20 months” doesn’t mean they will automatically receive the related perks.
Conversely, companies must make an effort toward recognizing their hard-working employees.
“Companies need to recognize that people are making huge investments in themselves — while also sacrificing their family time and social life — and if you don’t watch them or give them opportunities to grow, you might lose them,” says Dimechkie. “It’s the executives’ responsibility to make an impact, but also the companies’ responsibility to give them opportunities to expand.”
Of the AUB EMBA graduates, around 70 percent are either promoted within their company or are recruited by other companies at more senior levels. Alumni of the London Business School’s Dubai program double their salary within three years of completing the program. But Buckingham say what’s most interesting is how EMBA alumni’s careers are reoriented and redeveloped after the program.
Ultimately, no matter how much money one spends or how prestigious the institution, the onus lies in the hands of the EMBA participant.
“Just because you’re working hard and getting an education, if you don’t make an impact in the organization you’re in, they are not going to promote you or give you a higher salary,” says Dimechkie. “Somehow, you have to figure out a way to make an impact. Once they get noticed, they get promoted.”
