Thinking about doing an MBA - any recommendations?

[dirtychinchilla]

Morning all,

As per the title, I'm thinking about doing an MBA. I have a BEng from 2012 (I think) and I've been working at the same company since then. I'm a product manager, but I'm also responsible at a wider level for an SaaS product - not sure what title you'd give that.

I'm feeling a little out of my depth, and I'm conscious that I have no commercial knowledge other than what I've gained at work. It feels to me like doing a qualification would help me in that, and also be a boost for my personal development. I'm not 100% sure which type I would do. There seems to be a lot of different ones around. I'm involved in one product at a technical level, but I feel like I'm moving away from that more into product marketing and management. The product which I'm PM for is pretty small and therefore the management duties of that are quite slim.

I was just wondering if people had any thoughts or recommendations as I'm sure there are lots of professionals on here with MBAs.

Thanks in advance

dirtychinchilla

 

[dirtychinchilla]

Thanks for your input guys. Some context, which may be relevant, is that I don't intend to leave my current company. I've been here almost 10 years (I'm also 33) and very much believe in what we're doing - we're essentially in energy. So for me it is personal development as in how can I be a better asset to the company. Ideally, when the bosses retire etc I'd like to be in one of the executive positions. It's a small company, so that logic may not necessarily stack up, but certainly I'd be up for one of those top jobs and I want to ensure I have the knowledge to actually do that.

I had a chat with my boss about it earlier and he was very supportive. It really comes down to cost for me - they might sponsor half of it. We're saving for IVF, so can I afford to pay the other half? Probably not. So then it's up to me to ask the company whether they'd fund it or not (at essentially £1k a month for 27 months).

@rumple9 I am worried about how conceptial it might be. Generally, conceptial stuff doesn't sit too well with me. But part of me thinks I just need to grow up and suck it up. If I want to be a business leader I need some more structure and to understand more concepts.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

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.

Worth noting that some of the bigger firms actually subscribe to online courses from the top MBA institutions - and tbh, that may give you 90% of what you need.

Afternoon. Cheers. I think I'm going to say to them, what would it take to get you to pay for it in full? If I am a lifer (might be) then it would make complete sense for them to pay for it because it's entirely to the benefit of the company. It turns out (I didn't realise) that you can get a student loan for an MBA so if they say no, we'll fund half, I could still go ahead with it.

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...

 

[dirtychinchilla]

Business performance really. If we are doing well, money is plentiful and needs spending on something. I'd hold your ground on them paying for it in full but offer to take the golden handcuffs for 2 years. Then if you move on, you just ask your new employer to foot the bill.

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.

Unfortunately someone else set a president, someone who I presume is on a much better salary than me being an experienced account manager who receives commission. I just need to make my argument properly I guess. I'd be willing to sign for longer than 2 years frankly - it's £30k-£40k.

Hah fair enough. I really don't think I could do that. The course I'm looking at requires you to go somewhere occassionally, but not every week, which would probably suit me.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

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!

Hi @dowie. Very conscious that I didn't reply to you. I thought about it every week since!

Thank you again for your suggestions. I managed to get a 20% scholarship to one of the MBAs, and my company offered to pay 50% (so I was paying 30%), but it was a huge number of days out of work. So I'm doing a less intense one beginning in September, for which I still have an opportunity to get a scholarship. I want to minimise the cost as much as possible - I'm less than 2 years away from getting rid of my existing student loan.

The reason why I've gone for an in person one is that I was never that academic. Yes, I have a degree, but I hated most of it. So the more I'm in uni, the better. For me it's honestly a knowledge thing. I'm not fussed about networking or signalling; our business is growing and I want to make sure that I'm at the forefront of the growth instead of being left behind due to my lacking commercial experience in comparison to others being brought on.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

@dirtychinchilla Ah, that's awesome, glad it's worked out for you with your company.

Thanks bud

 

[dirtychinchilla]

From what you say you have a engineering degree the maths part of the MBA would be so easy that you probably not need to study. As long as you know descriptive/ inferential stats you should be good to go.

In all honesty if your employer can pay for it then only go to the top 20 MBA providers. Wharton in the US being top , LBS top in UK then judge business school.

Do not fall for the other universities in the UK that offer it. Having a top MBA from the best 20 will open so many doors.

MBAs are pretty easy from what I have seen, I don't really think they provide great knowledge transfer but having the right institutions name opens the doors.

Maybe try a postgraduate degree, like a masters. Top UK universities only do masters and they do not normally offer postgraduate certs or dips.

However, you can join top UK university and bail out after 4 modules and only pay for those modules and gain a cert, which is a sly way and one they do not tell students.

You are better offer doing a masters then MBA, than MBA and later on doing a masters.

MSc will provide easier access to a top university than a BEng.

One of my MSc I did select a management module from a list of MBA modules as my elective. I thought it was a joke of a module. We are looking at a top ranking world university.

Honesty, I think a MSc is much harder than a MBA.

Personally if I were going to do a MBA it would have to be from the top 5 or 10 otherwise I don't really see the point.

Thanks for your input. I've no desire to do an engineering masters. I'm not a great engineer; I'm more commercial. I'll be doing the MBA at Henley, which is top 10 according to the FT. But I believe I'll gain a load of knowledge and skills from doing it.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

I agree, when I've sought employer funding towards training in the past I've proposed clawback rather than giving up salary, and I wasn't even a lifer. For lifers it's an even worse idea because the compounding will continually bite you every year, you don't get the chance to break out of the downward spiral of low pay like you do when you change employer. Then to add on top, in times of double-digit inflation like we have now forgoing a pay rise is much more meaningful than it was a few years ago.

I don't think mine will factor in, although I need to have that conversation. It's quite low cost for the company (£13.5k) over nearly three years, so it shouldn't factor in at all. I'm more annoyed by the potential student loan! I managed to get a 20% scholarship on the course I applied for, but have deferred so I'll have to re-apply for a scholarship. Fingers crossed for 50%!

 

[dirtychinchilla]

Good luck with your choice, personally I would have gone WBS in that price range, CASS renamed Bayes now for a bit more. Masters in some related subject before MBA is a very good way to get into the world top 10 MBA programmes and receive financial aid. Extra year but it will save you £10,000s.

There's a big convenience factor - Henley is very easy for me to get to and stay nearby. Warwick, not so much.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

Are you a member of a professional institution? A lot of them offer discounts for MBA and MSc courses.

Interesting. I'm not - when I have been I never felt I benefitted at all from them. I'll definitely investigate that, thanks for the tip.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

I just thought I'd update this thread. I've been accepted for the Flexible MBA at Henley Business School, starting in September. My company is paying 50%, and I managed to win a scholarship for the other 50%, so it's now free! Which is awesome

 

[dirtychinchilla]

That's amazing well done! And good luck.

Thanks

 

[dirtychinchilla]

Further update, everyone (I know you've been waiting with baited breath).

I started the course on Monday. The campus is ridiculous - it's like they've taken a National Trust park and dropped a little bit of uni in there (https://www.henley.ac.uk/why/campuses/greenlands). We stayed on site for two nights in "student accomodation", which were basically hotel rooms. We got three cooked meals a day (I would have liked a bloody sandwich, but there you go). And the room we were in was air conditioned.

My cohort is great. There are 28 of us, split into four teams of seven each.

We had a fantastic icebreaker. As far as I remember, there were four parts (and I'm writing this down because it was so much better than the usual crap, in case anyone wants to use it):

1. In the room, we were asked to see it as a map of the world and with that in mind, go and stand somewhere meaningful to you and talk to whoever was also stood there about their place. I chose Canterbury, Kent, where my wife went to uni. We spent a lot of time there in the first few years of our relationship. So, I went east obviously. The guy next to me had chosen Singapore...so that was funny. Funny enough that I remember it though.
2. Then we had to go round and find people with similar jobs to ourselves. Best category was people who couldn't find anything in common with anyone else.
3. Then it was finding similar industries. I ended up in construction.
4. On the rope again, we had to order ourselves in terms of birthday (year excluded) without speaking. We could only do sign language. That was pretty entertaining as you had a few people who completely ****** it up.
5. Last was bingo. We had a bingo box thing of 12 things about people like, "has a famous friend" or "plays an instrument" and you had to go around collecting people's names who fitted those boxes.

Honestly, this worked brilliantly. We got a lot of names, and knew a lot about each other very quickly. And it was just not awkward in any sense of the word. There's also a general rule that it's OK to forget people's names, though I did learn most of them in the end.

Then it was three days of learning study skills and an introduction to personal development / managing systems and processes. The personal development module is incredibly exciting. I would honestly recommend anyone just do this part if they get the opportunity. It's all about reflecting and understanding yourself.

I left with a hell of a lot to think about. Mainly about my team and my leadership skills, and I've already sort of started to implement a few changes; I want to lead. I don't want to be a product specialist like I am now. Fortunately, my work are incredibly supportive of this and I'm sure they've put me where I am so that I can be a future leader. So that's bloody exciting.

I'm feeling like I made a fantastic decision. Absolutely buzzing from it. What I want to work out how to do next week is how to set my team up each week to feel empowered and to feel the same buzz I'm feeling now, because I think it can be done.

Sadly, one of my guys called today and let me know he's got a new job. I'm pretty gutted; he's a great guy and losing him is a real blow to my department and to the company. He is going to a friendly consultancy who spec my product all the tie and therefore I expect to hear from him regularly. I just hope he's the advocate I think he'll be!

Random closing thought: the professional development module asks you to journal about work. I've done it the past three days and it has been great for getting my thoughts in order about how I want to do things at work. It will also then contribute to the assignments I'll have to do on personal development.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

For Icebreaker #4, were you able to speak beforehand to agree how you would sign it? Or did you have to non-verbally communicate and agree on a 'system' for communication?

I guess the way I would do it is partition by month first (everyone hold up number of fingers for their birth month, with 11 and 12 doing some different signal like waving their arms or whatever), to gather into small monthly cohorts, in order of month number. And then within the month cohorts (which can't be that big if it's 28 people total) you could just take it in turn to communicate what day your birthday is by flashing up fingers, and the others move before or after you based on that.

Obviously might need to tweak this if there were people with physical disabilities (something I think is often overlooked when planning icebreakers).

There was no talking, no. I did exactly what you said - month first and then day once we'd got month sorted out.

You're right about disabilities. I don't know what we would have done in that case. But they would have known in advance had anyone been disabled. As a uni, I think they're pretty hot on that sort of thing. I saw a couple of people there at the time who had obvious physical disabliities - I think they were staff.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

Heh, if there's no prep time where you can discuss approach I can see that being difficult to get 28 people all on the same page about what system you are using to communicate. Even if most arrive at the same system there could easily be a couple who have a different approach in mind. In their minds it's probably the rest of you that ****ed up, not them

It became really obvious immediately what people were doing. Flash up the numbers on your fingers...you've got 12 potentials initially. Then flash up the next bit.

To be fair, of 28 people only about 3 were in the wrong place.

So the first lesson is communication..

I did look at henley MBA too but at the time I was looking for a job after being made redundant. Now well it would be nice but unlikely the place I’m at now would even stoop so low to fund some real career progression.

Maybe when the house is paid off..

Good luck

It does sound pretty cool, I like how it used to be the civil service equivalent of the military Staff Colleges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henley_Business_School

@dirtychinchilla I assume the MBA course run at that "Greenlands" campus where the former staff college used to be?

It is at Greenlands, and it's bloody lovely. I think the staff college is still there and they've added modern extensions to it.