The master’s in business administration is a comprehensive business degree at an advanced level. Students learn a broad range of skills (12 to 16 subjects with most courses). These include management and practical leadership, marketing management for companies, and financial management and accounts as it pertains to strategic decision making.
There are many benefits of taking and achieving an MBA. Let’s look at some of those and how best to apply for the course too.
Understand Business Finances Clearly
A student who passes an MBA course has a solid understanding of accounting principles. They learn what a balance sheet, cashflow forecast, and profit and loss statement are all about and how each can be used as tools within a business to perform better. While the student does not go into the depth that an accountant would do with the minutia around financial accounts, they do gain a broad overview of the financial accounts of a business, how they differ from personal finances such as depreciation and write-off charges, and how to interpret them.
Some electives to add extra subjects of specialization with an MBA include Business Economics or Corporate Finance. With the former, a student gains a better understanding about how companies best conduct business to create earnings that fall to the bottom-line. With the latter, the focus on corporate finance is useful to work with funding sources and refinancing of the core financial base of a company via bonds, stock issues and other methods to fund the growth of a company.
Management vs Leadership
When studying an MBA, students learn about strategic management. This relates to managing an organization in order to meet certain strategic goals of the CEO. Learning how to deal effectively, lead, motivate and organize teams to get the best performance and achieve the stated goals is studied at multiple levels. Attention is paid to both management theory and management practice where the reality may differ from what academia traditionally teaches on other business courses. As such, the study of management and leadership is highly practical for business leaders and people who aspire to become a leader.
Networking
While businesses tend to be highly competitive with other companies in their peer group, they often have little involvement with companies outside of it. Because of this, people who work within the same industry their whole working life often get a little pigeonholed as a result and their amount of business contacts suffers accordingly.
Networking with MBA students is one of the aspects that is the gift that keeps on giving long after the MBA qualification has been achieved. Students from all types of industries meet each other as a result of taking an MBA course and becoming alumni at the college. Strong alumni associations foster cooperation between former students which often leads to new business opportunities, strategic partnerships, and even recommending staff members who are looking for a new senior role in a different industry. For many former MBA students, the networking is worth the price of admission alone.
It’s useful to point out at this juncture that with the introduction of the Online MBA GMAT Waiver, people with five years of either business experience or military service are likely to side-step the GMAT exam that other MBA applicants must take and pass. It’s understood that time in business or as a veteran likely has covered enough of the basic core principles that form the early stages of the MBA training, that taking the GMAT exam becomes a moot point.
Flexible Skills Applicable to Different Industries
Most MBA degrees cover 12+ subjects over several years including allowing students to choose their electives to further mold the usefulness of their personalized MBA course. The depth and breadth of the wide range of subjects included in the course provides knowledge that is broadly applicable across a range of industries and possible roles. As such, the flexible skill-set creates not one defined career path for graduates, but numerous ones.
It’s true that the specialization certainly helps narrow down the field for job suitability (someone who chose to study about corporate finance is likely a good candidate for a Chief Financial Officer in the future) but there’s plenty of other options open to the holder of an MBA.
An MBA is an advanced degree for people who believe their future lies at senior levels within business organizations or perhaps wants to run their own business someday and finds having a broad knowledge base to have serious value. It’s certainly true that some positions aren’t open to applicants who won’t possess a master’s degree which is to the graduate’s advantage. The MBA is universally recognized as it is studied at colleges globally, which also lets graduates work abroad if they wish to have that opportunity through a company with regional offices around the world.
By Nina Mosely