Can demand for executive MBAs ride out recession?
Anh Nguyen applied to the executive MBA course at Chicago Booth School of Business before the world was upended by Covid-19. She even flew to the US from her London home in early 2020 to see the campus before the pandemic rendered travel impossible.
She completed much of the course online and graduated in June this year, as the energy crisis created further uncertainty for jobs and career prospects. But Nguyen, who advises Fortune 500 companies on financial risk strategy in her role as a director at Chatham Financial, believes she judged the timing well. The turbulent period gave her insights into the thinking of board directors, which helped in her current role, and also the skills to pursue her next goal of setting up her own venture.
Nguyen is now in the process of launching a blockchain business for the arts sector with six classmates from Booth, spread between Brazil, Hungary and the UK, helping cultural organisations to engage with their audiences and generate revenue using non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Demand for EMBAs, and full-time MBAs, jumped during the pandemic as the cost of taking a career break, or committing spare time to study that could improve career prospects, reduced. As the anxiety of lockdowns began to be replaced with concern about recession, this drive to gain skills that can help in uncertain times remained strong.
The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the standardised test taken by business school applicants, reports that the uptick in people taking the exam in 2021 has continued into 2022.
“Growing fear of recession, the state of unemployment and desire for wage growth ahead of inflation are all relevant factors,” says Joy Jones, the GMAC’s new CEO.
This is reflected in rising applications to schools. Kai Stenzel, chief marketing officer for the Mannheim Business School in Germany, says expressions of interest in its EMBA have increased 20 per cent over the past three years.
“Currently, in Germany, there are about 2mn vacant positions, but fortysomethings, the target EMBA group, are preparing now for a harder labour market in a few years’ time,” he says.
However, Duran adds that the UK school’s EMBA numbers are holding up “quite nicely”, partly because of people who deferred studying during the pandemic lockdowns now taking up places on the programme.
Kelley Martin Blanco, senior associate dean for EMBA and global programmes at Columbia Business School in New York, says that the tight jobs market can actually give executives who wish to study part-time the leverage to negotiate time off to do so.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Jonathan Moules
