This text is part of the special section Higher education
Some have already said that a master’s degree in business administration, better known by its acronym MBA (Master of Business Administration), is above all a master’s degree in time management! Talk to the professional women and men who embark on the adventure: they usually have a well-established career, with its share of requirements, as well as a family, a real box of surprises for the unexpected. This threefold reconciliation requires great discipline, and a lot of creativity, some of the qualities required in future graduates.
“It’s a big challenge, we can’t hide it,” says Kevin J. Johnson, director of the MBA program at HEC Montreal. His is partly to make him better known while taking the right measure of the professional maturity of the candidates, shattering in passing some myths, including the one that it is strictly “a way to advance his career”. Because it is rather “a profession in itself, with this capacity to solve complex and human problems”.
You must first have seen them up close, and sometimes have suffered them head-on, if you later want to resolve them once you occupy a decision-making position. “To those who have just finished a bachelor’s degree and who would like to start an MBA, I would rather propose to acquire three years of experience in the labor market”, specifies the one who is also director of the Center for studies in transformation of organizations. Because not only the past experiences are decisive for new students, but little time is given to the theory. “We consider that it is assimilated, because it is first of all an immersive program centered on the practice, the work of team, but also networking activities. “
The virus of change
Since March 2020, there has been a lot of talk about the impact of the pandemic on business management. HEC Montréal was not spared, forced as it was, like all other educational establishments, to review its teaching methods and adapt the course content to the new reality. She also shattered the walls of the traditional classroom, which was beneficial for the MBA.
“We were able to find international contacts to bring them to our classes [de manière virtuelle], really interesting people to our students, and we’re going to keep that habit going, ”says Kevin J. Johnson. This is not the only change that has been made, at a time when terms like “face-to-face” and “comodal” (education offered both at a distance and in class) are not empty words when we wants to undertake an MBA.
The faculty had of course to adapt, even if the work-family-study balance experienced by several students was already familiar to them. “The part-time MBA, newly offered since the pandemic, meets their needs,” says the director. It is a hybrid format that offers the choice of attending classes in class or at a distance, but we partly keep our face-to-face formula, because our approach is based on problem-solving, decision-making in a context of uncertainty, and that it must be done in part as a team. Students who exchange with each other, for example in intensive courses on Saturdays, forge links and then help each other. Put two HEC graduates who do not know each other on a board of directors and they will quickly agree on common principles and values. “
The human factor
This dynamic of collegiality and sharing within the framework of the MBA constitutes an essential learning for all managers who wish to stand out within their organization, the one they want to join or the one they want to… found. The pandemic has accentuated the presence – some would say invasive – of several technologies that are already accessible and that have been imposed by force of circumstances, but it has done much more than that, according to Kevin J. Johnson.
“The last two years have highlighted the importance of a healthy organizational culture, that of well-being at work, and even teleworking. Occupying a leadership position within a team of competent professionals in such a context requires training. And that goes far beyond knowing how to define a business. Not only must we develop the capacity to be understood by each specialist, whether they are responsible for human resources or accountants, we must also understand the human being behind. “