At long last I have reached a conclusion regarding choice of MBA and will start the Manchester Global MBA in July.

I would be interested in discussing the experiences of any current students or alumni.

BigD

There are not many current students or alumni who come to this board. Ask the school to connect you instead.

One current student, Frances, posted at http://www.find-mba.com/board/25113 and you might be able to contact her.

OK Duncan thanks. As I have received a lot of useful info from this forum, I'll be returning in the future to give something back.

BigD

Congratulation for your choice! If I m not too curious, what did convince you to take this choice?

I'm currently in my fourth semester, so if you've got any questions feel free to ask them.

I just spent 30 mins writing a detailed reply and the site logged me out and I lost the content. Not happy. I'll try again tomorrow.

BigD

There are a number of reasons for my choice:

a) Reputation and brand recognition
A brand with good recognition in UK but also further afield. Ranking 29th worldwide in the full-time ranking.

b) Flexibility
2.5-5 year duration with hiatus or more or less modules. Obviously it disrupts a cohort but it is important for me that the flexible options exists without major hassle.

c) The International Centres (owned by MBS, and the MBS academics travel to teach there) offer alternative venues & therefore dates for Module Workshops as well as a wider range of experiences. Many other MBA programmes are far more inflexible both in schedule of modules and the extent of the overseas elements.

As someone that is moving continent shortly this flexibility is important as travelling to Manchester for each of the modules will not be practical. This is a key reason why Manchester made more sense than other such courses like Warwick or even Oxford.

d) Attendance but not too much
It is important to network with other students and this is achieved through 3-day attendance for each module. Usually two modules can be taken consecutively to reduce travelling. This means six weeks approx of attendance. This is significantly less than the 14 or even 17 week-long modules of other courses. This level of attendance,coupled with their inflexibility, ruled out some EMBA offerings for me.

e) Overall value proposition
Great value at about 26kGBP and a good fit for my needs. The marginal cost of climbing up the rankings further is significant.

f) teamwork and collaborative focus, interesting and obviously of benefit though lower in my priorities.

g) Strong core subjects but limited electives
I've seen some of the notes and they seem pretty good, especially the Corporate Finance and Managerial Economics. The electives seem more limited.

The compromises I have had to make for Manchester relate to the nature of the cohort - likely to be younger and less experienced than a full EMBA; and the impact of moving base centre in the future. This means not being able to benefit from the same cohort for half of the course.

Other EMBAs that I considered required attendance of 8 weeks a year over fixed duration with no or minimal flexibility. This is to ensure the cohort take the journey together but is a commitment I could not make at this time.

So I am very happy to be starting the Manchester Global MBA a quality established part-time flexible course. I am sure will be great fun.

BigD

I think you have an excellent summary of the programme. The cohort is closer to the full-time MBAs than to an executive MBA, and that's why MBS will be relaunching its EMBA next year. Of course you also have the strength (and competitive weakness) of MBS, its focus on strong core courses to give the fundamentals, in contrast to competitors like Warwick who whizz though the core in order to give maximum electives.

A friend of mine is in the final stages of the MBS Global MBA. What impresses me is the amount of group work, projects and on-site work which combine to give a real cohort experience. Of all the distance learning MBAs, I think that Manchester and Cornell have the best solutions.

At long last I have reached a conclusion regarding choice of MBA and will start the Manchester Global MBA in July.

There are a number of reasons for my choice:

a) Reputation and brand recognition
A brand with good recognition in UK but also further afield. Ranking 29th worldwide in the full-time ranking.

b) Flexibility
2.5-5 year duration with hiatus or more or less modules. Obviously it disrupts a cohort but it is important for me that the flexible options exists without major hassle.

c) The International Centres (owned by MBS, and the MBS academics travel to teach there) offer alternative venues & therefore dates for Module Workshops as well as a wider range of experiences. Many other MBA programmes are far more inflexible both in schedule of modules and the extent of the overseas elements.

As someone that is moving continent shortly this flexibility is important as travelling to Manchester for each of the modules will not be practical. This is a key reason why Manchester made more sense than other such courses like Warwick or even Oxford.

d) Attendance but not too much
It is important to network with other students and this is achieved through 3-day attendance for each module. Usually two modules can be taken consecutively to reduce travelling. This means six weeks approx of attendance. This is significantly less than the 14 or even 17 week-long modules of other courses. This level of attendance,coupled with their inflexibility, ruled out some EMBA offerings for me.

e) Overall value proposition
Great value at about 26kGBP and a good fit for my needs. The marginal cost of climbing up the rankings further is significant.

f) teamwork and collaborative focus, interesting and obviously of benefit though lower in my priorities.

g) Strong core subjects but limited electives
I've seen some of the notes and they seem pretty good, especially the Corporate Finance and Managerial Economics. The electives seem more limited.

The compromises I have had to make for Manchester relate to the nature of the cohort - likely to be younger and less experienced than a full EMBA; and the impact of moving base centre in the future. This means not being able to benefit from the same cohort for half of the course.

Other EMBAs that I considered required attendance of 8 weeks a year over fixed duration with no or minimal flexibility. This is to ensure the cohort take the journey together but is a commitment I could not make at this time.

So I am very happy to be starting the Manchester Global MBA a quality established part-time flexible course. I am sure will be great fun.

BigD

At long last I have reached a conclusion regarding choice of MBA and will start the Manchester Global MBA in July.

I would be interested in discussing the experiences of any current students or alumni.

BigD

cvm, thanks for sharing this info, it's very interesting.

I do consider Warwick a top university and I see its business school as the direct competition of MBS

I'm gonna post more chronological info in the next weeks just to share my experience up to now, with pros and cons, of course.

The MBS Global MBA starts with a compulsory introduction workshop named GEL (Global Events and Leadership) which takes place in July/Jan (as per your intake) but before discussing about it, I?ll have a brief of some logistics activities.

Prior to this induction session, you are asked to get familiar with the blackboard tool and support site where all the needed information will be posted along the program. Also, the completion of two separate quick tests about Health and Safety and Anti Plagiarism has to be done (after studying the given materials, of course).

Personally, I found the BB and support sites a bit awkward at the beginning, but once you get familiar with them, they become much easy to work with. The important thing is that all the information you need is there in due time. Of course there are some small IT problems from time to time which sometimes are a bit annoying but they are fixing fast enough. However, I'll have a more detailed situation in a later post.

Before the beginning of each semester they are mailing you all the needed books and support for the entire semester.
Also, they allocate a mentor to each student, who will help along the program with all the operational aspects (not academic at all) you might encounter.

In a nutshell I can say that they are quite organized on these aspects although in the admission phase, I felt they were a bit slower than my expectations. I have to admit that Warwick was better in responsiveness of the admission process than MBS.

Regards,

Thanks for your comments thusfar. My sensitivity to ranking has been quite mellow as long as it is a good school with good brand awareness outside the UK.

It has made me question the nature and value of attendance. I have attended courses in the past that teach at the attended modules then examine you in the same week. This is not a good approach in my opinion as there is so little time to present the information and negligible time to absorb it. The concept of blended learning allows you to work over the material and generate lots of silly (= very important) questions like "_why_ is the firm supply curve equal to marginal cost", "when is vertical integration not a good idea" or "why does that number booked to _that_ account" which you can then bore people with in class.

This means the attendance is spent strengthening rather than trying to learn new material. I note also that they are used for practical exercises: if I have to start another greetings card company I shall scream.

The international centres are a big plus for the Manchester course. Warwick has the occasional overseas elective (Mannheim vs Shanghai?) but if you want to forego some of the cohort experience with the Manchester Global course then you can do a bit of travelling over the modules. Which is what I intended to do: whereever I lay my pocket calculator is my home etc etc...

BigD

For me it was a bit different. I remember I have defined 12 or 13 criteria and gave points for each when comparing MBS with Warwick. After that I have attributed a weight according to my interest to each criterion and got the final score. I can say that they were quite close with an edge for MBS. I have finally decided for MBS when I evaluated the experience I had with MBS's alumni as comparred to WBS's ones.


Some of your highlighted points will be present in MBS, e.g. during the campus presence, in the first day of each workshop you will get a group assignment which is to be finished and presented in the 2nd or 3rd day in an "examination" manner. Normally you need 3 marks in order to finish one module. The first one is an individual assignment, the second one is this group project and the third one is either a final assignment or a written exam.

Regarding the international centers, this was also one of my favorite criterion, the fact that you can also enjoy a bit the experience of combining the study activity with visiting different parts of the world. Not to mention that Warwick has less locations and they are charging a quite important fee if you choose to go to Roma or HK for one module (outside the normal Warwick weeks)

I'm gonna continue the posts with the induction and GEL (Global Events and Leadership) workshop. This is a compulsory one.

In the morning of the first day, you are introduced into the overall program, discuss about it and academic expectations with the MBA program director, have a Q&A session and so on. After that you have to do a team task which is quite delightful (I wont tell you what it is but I enjoyed it a lot)

The groups are already made, you will find your name on a table together with other 4 or 5 persons.

In the afternoon you will have the lunch with colleagues and your mentor and will have the opportunity to network a little bit.

After the lunch break the GEL course will start and you will get the first group assignment (a study case).

Generally they will speak about different leadership types, open discussions, etc. The whole idea is about "map reading / map making and map testing".

Coming to the group assignment, it has to be finished and presented in the 3rd day and all the team will receive later a mark for it.

After the workshop, you are asked to complete an individual essay on your chosen subject and write it in a certain style (check
http://leaderswedeserve.wordpress.com/) which has to incorporate the taught concepts of map reading, testing and mapping...

Overall, I liked this module although the marking of the final assignment had some fierce debates because I remember that lots of my mates got a very poor mark (in the range of 40-50%) and the university policy does not allow you to challenge it.

The global feeling was that even if the requested elements were included in the assignment (as everyone believed), the markers were quite rigid.

I've also been offered a place on the MBS Global MBA, starting in July (Finance Accelerated route), however I'm tormenting myself over whether the investment will be worthwhile in the end.

I'm a CIMA qualified accountant working in a business planning role for a large media business, so I'm NOT a technical accountant. I'm not looking to shift my career horizontally, but am keen to gain vertical acceleration, probably into a commercial FD type of role. My boss, the CFO, begain a distance MBA at Warwick around 15 years ago, but stopped when he had his first kid. Nonetheless he valued his experience highly, crediting it for transforming his career, and wishes he'd been able to complete it.

At the moment I'm not entirely clear on what I hope to get out of the experience - I'm finding it difficult to commit to making the decision given the financial and lifestyle sacrifices it will inevitably result in.

BigD - what are your objectives?

Are there any other alumni on here that can share their objectives and whether they were met by the course?

My objectives are to obtain knowledge of financial and management accounting and managerial economics, with additional interest in marketing to support cross-functional and general management in engineering firms.

MBAs are broad-based and seem to have a cachet beyond a specialist MSc. For example I considered a study of Corporate Finance at ICMA in Reading but not only did it seem a bit too narrow, I realised there are lots of marginal skills that a good MBA can develop. More importantly it can provide a framework to integrate all the concepts and learning from the functional areas into an integrated view of how the firm operated in its environment...

As a more mature (!) student, the knowledge, networking and international experience is more important than the qualification to me: though an MBA from a well-ranked school can't be bad can it :-)

BigD

I've also been offered a place on the MBS Global MBA, starting in July (Finance Accelerated route), however I'm tormenting myself over whether the investment will be worthwhile in the end.

I'm a CIMA qualified accountant working in a business planning role for a large media business, so I'm NOT a technical accountant. I'm not looking to shift my career horizontally, but am keen to gain vertical acceleration, probably into a commercial FD type of role. My boss, the CFO, begain a distance MBA at Warwick around 15 years ago, but stopped when he had his first kid. Nonetheless he valued his experience highly, crediting it for transforming his career, and wishes he'd been able to complete it.

At the moment I'm not entirely clear on what I hope to get out of the experience - I'm finding it difficult to commit to making the decision given the financial and lifestyle sacrifices it will inevitably result in.

BigD - what are your objectives?

Are there any other alumni on here that can share their objectives and whether they were met by the course?

My objectives are to obtain knowledge of financial and management accounting and managerial economics, with additional interest in marketing to support cross-functional and general management in engineering firms.

MBAs are broad-based and seem to have a cachet beyond a specialist MSc. For example I considered a study of Corporate Finance at ICMA in Reading but not only did it seem a bit too narrow, I realised there are lots of marginal skills that a good MBA can develop. More importantly it can provide a framework to integrate all the concepts and learning from the functional areas into an integrated view of how the firm operated in its environment...

As a more mature (!) student, the knowledge, networking and international experience is more important than the qualification to me: though an MBA from a well-ranked school can't be bad can it :-)

BigD

Having worked with a CIMA-qualified CFO, I think it's important to not underestimate the value of the strategic value of the CIMA qualification. I was very impressed, for example with what CIMA holders learn about intangible assets.

That said, it's significant that around 10% of CIMAs do hold MBAs, and these are most often from Manchester, Warwick, Henley or the Open University -- all schools with distance learning programmes (Wharton and London Business School are also popular choices). These CIMAs are typically in financial services business, rather than in accounting (top employers are Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Ernst & Young, UBS, IBM, Deloitte, UBS Wealth Management).

I think if you were moving in this direction, out of a functional accounting specialisation and into a context where you need to work as a peer to general managers, then the MBA would be a great investment.

PS Don't underestimate the experience, rather than the content. The soft skills and cross-cultural elements are really important.