Career tip: Is a part-time MBA worth your money and time?

Photo: Business Today

Five years ago, Neeraj Arya, now a deputy manager with a telecom company, enrolled for a short duration, distance learning management programme being conducted by arguably the most prestigious business school in the country, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).

He had hoped it would open up new career options for him. But after attending a few interviews once he had completed the course, he realised to his shock that it would do no such thing.

"As soon as my interviewers heard I had done a distance learning course and not the regular postgraduate programme, they were no longer interested," he says.
Thousands of young people who are already employed, but who, for various reasons, missed out on traditional management education, take such part-time courses - often conducted long distance, using satellite - hoping to improve their career prospects.

Though IIM-A has stopped them, many other leading management schools such as IIM, Bangalore and Lucknow, XLRI, Jamshedpur, and Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi, persist with these courses.

Why are employers unimpressed? It is primarily because, unlike in a regular MBA course, where the selection process is rigorous, almost anyone who wants to - and pays the fee - can enrol for part time courses.

"There is a lot of competition to get into the MBA programmes offered by reputed schools. This is not perceived to be the case with executive MBA courses," says Ruchi Bajpai, senior HR consultant with Elixir Consulting, a recruitment and search firm.
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Source: Business Today