Can Executive MBA be considered- the best strategic career investment

Executive MBA (Analytics) aims to prepare participants to become business leaders who can harness the power of analytics to improve organizational processes.

Industry 4.0 has opened new avenues along with newer challenges for the employees to upskill themselves.
The speed of transformation driven by technology is increasing, resulting in a faster pace of change in the global labor market. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates that more than one billion jobs will be transformed by 2030. Many organizations are hesitant to invest time and resources into training individuals due to the rapid pace of innovation, preferring to depend on various executive education programs instead. Successful companies are actively collaborating with educational partners to create innovative pathways and broaden their pool of talent.

The Higher Education Institutions (HEI) must develop partnerships with organizations to ensure that coursework remains relevant and up-to-date for industries with highly specific requirements. This is also in sync with India’s new education policy which emphasizes the need to prepare professionals in cutting-edge areas that are fast gaining prominence, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), 3-D machining, big data analysis, and machine learning, in addition to genomic studies, biotechnology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, with important applications to health, environment, and sustainable living.

Industry 4.0 has opened new avenues along with newer challenges for the employees to upskill themselves or they may become irrelevant. The challenge faced by global markets is how to fill the new jobs being created, as they often require higher skillsets than the jobs they replace. To meet this challenge, the Executive MBA offerings must be developed to accelerate progress and enable the HEI/Industry collaborations at scale. Governments and system builders can help promote this balance and support the growth of such high-impact programs. The Executive MBA is witnessing a rapid transformation and modification of the existing structure is being experimented with and offered by various HEIs.

One such example can be the Executive MBA (Analytics) which aims to prepare participants to become business leaders who can harness the power of analytics to improve organizational processes. Such programmes train learners in the emerging and interdisciplinary areas of analytics, technology, and management through cross-functional academic and practical learning. The Indian market is witnessing more such offerings in areas of healthcare, tourism, agri-business and so on. Executive MBA is known to catapult careers to leadership and often provide entry to the boardrooms for various mid-management professions. Apart from a lateral shift of domain, which is very difficult, it is often correlated with salary hikes, increments, role change, upgrading of responsibilities and more strategic placement in new and with current employments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred innovation in both educators and employers, opening opportunities for career-connected learning pathways that combine classroom learning with on-the-job experience, leading to improved learning experience. Executive MBA or EMBA courses take a candidate out of the comfort zone to learn new skills spanning domains.

Being administered to New Age executives, the Executive MBA programmes need to be pedagogically different from regular MBA programmes. One such requirement is the mode of delivery. The hybrid mode of offering education both in online and offline form has opened new opportunities for the HEIs by increasing the reach to larger pool of participants. The Executive MBAs are also designed more in hybrid mode post pandemic making learning more convenient for the participants. This has resulted in increased intake for Executive MBA in most of the premier management HEIs in India. The increased enrolment can be attributed to the desire of the participants to update themselves with newer skills and the onus lies with the HEIs as well to make their course curriculum contemporary and focus on imparting skills along with the basic management education.

Many institutes are preferring the online mode for cost saving but it is more suitable in certain domains and especially where the average age of the learner is younger. This means the hybrid mode may be preferred for an executive MBA which caters to the upskilling needs of those seeking fast track career paths to get into leadership positions.

One analysis by Bain and Company reveals that fast-growing job categories are likely to pay six times more than the slow growing ones. Thus, the issue at hand is not a lack of jobs, but rather a shortage of skilled workers, which stems from a failure to properly educate and train individuals to succeed in the modern economy. Despite the availability of good jobs, employers struggle to find qualified candidates, and the education system and companies themselves are not adequately preparing job seekers with the necessary skills. This problem is current and is expected to worsen as the supply-demand imbalance in the labor market persists.

The consequences of this issue include a threat to economic growth, which has already become a destabilizing factor around the world. This makes Executive MBA more relevant in the present context, provided the HEIs can properly blend management education with newer skill sets like analytics and thus improve the employability of the participants. In this way, the HEIs can offer a sustainable way to provide talent and diverse workforce to the industry thus adding to economic growth and a more equitable, productive society. The opportunity is great; the time is now.

Source: Print Media