If I were you I'd aim to get an employer to fund it (albeit not at the expense of raises), I guess if it's £30-40k then that's quite feasible (some of the top programs seem to cost more like £100k).
When times were tough, I funded a lads MBA via deferred salary increases/golden handcuffs. If you are a "lifer" it may be worth suggesting it in that way to your employer i.e. they foot the full bill but next years pay rise is nill, or if you quit within 2 years you pay it back in full.
I'd say the opposite tbh... raises carry forwards so if you're a lifer then it doesn't necessarily make sense to fund via giving up pay increases, the NPV of several years pay after say missing a raise or two could easily exceed the tuition and you'd be better off with a loan. If, however, you're going to leave after the 2 year clawback period it could well be worthwhile simply because training benefits like that are tax-free; say you lose £XX,XXX in additional comp over 2 years but net of income tax that additional comp is < £35k (or whatever the tuition costs are).
Ideally, you'd just want to negotiate for the tuition to be paid for in return for a clawback period (simply retaining a good employee for two years more can be well worth an additional £35k), training is usually a different budget and shouldn't (directly) affect pay though allocation of the training budget can be used to reward people and indeed a big expense like this could be used as an excuse for allocating a lower portion of say a bonus pool etc.. but I think that sort of thing is short-sighted as the sort of people pushing for self-improvement etc.. are generally the sort of people the company wants to retain.
We don't have any subscriptions to anything like that. We're about 100 people, so no big firm. I don't want to do any online course though. I know that I need to sit and listen to someone or I won't actually do anything. Which is why I spend so much time on Overclockers...
I was going to suggest that there are online courses that may be useful:
https://quantic.edu/
That's perhaps more in line with having online some quality lectures as dlockers mentioend than say a full-fat MBA, it's an accredited degree but MBAs are typically also accredited by some international organisations and that one isn't (yet).
I wouldn't necessarily pay for something like that but if you had an employer who won't fork out 35k but maybe will fork out 10k or whatever then maybe worth a look, importantly I think they cut it down to smaller bitesize chunks so you could view mini-lectures on your phone etc. it's perhaps still suitable for someone who otherwise wouldn't cope well with online only.
MBAs generally aren't known to be particularly difficult, it seems more like you're paying to do a bit of signaling and to build a network, that quantic course could in theory simply be open to anyone with an undergrad degree (and perhaps at even lower fees) but it seems like they're deliberately restricting it to try and increase the brand value, rather than being from a prestigious business school it's simply artificially hard to get into and the cohort is disproportionately people from [well-known brand name] companies. Whether that works out or not as a useful addition to your CV/useful signal and/or useful network (since it's online) is to be seen but it's a more affordable gamble especially if a company pays!
Yeah I am similar however the content was amazing - and it was video instructor led. They literally filmed the lecture that the people in the real world received. And these are lecturers that are world renowned/masters at their subject.
I had something similar at a former employer but focused more on fiance and some soft skills stuff, while I haven't seen anything that would replace some of the detailed finance stuff (I guess even more common ACA, CFA tutorials are usually provided by private providers not universities) there are plenty of universities who have now made high-quality lectures available for free. I guess, after all, their selling point is more the credentials, small tutorials/office hours, the network and the brand name.
For example here someone has put together a free MBA including Coursera lectures from Wharton which is often ranked as the number 1 business school in the world:
Path to a free self-taught education in Business. Contribute to dperconti/MOOC-MBA development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
If it's just the knowledge/education people are after then that's now easily available completely free of charge.
