An Interview With London Business School’s EMBA Chief

P&Q: Are EMBA students requiring more career management support? If so, exactly what kinds of help are they seeking and getting?

EMBAs are typically looking to change their careers or move up the corporate ladder. They want to be very much more in control of their career paths. It is becoming increasingly necessary to cater to specific needs of the EMBA audience. We have to have flexibility for that. They come in with different aspirations than when they leave. They have met new people and develop new ways of thinking. Career services needs to recognize that journey.

At London, we are offering one-to-one and career coaching sessions. We are not just running ad hoc sessions. We look at the requirements needed for this set of students and try to build something that will best support them as they move through the program. We are seeing that they want to take more control while they are here.

In our curriculum, we emphasize the importance of career management as a life skill. Sometimes significant career changes might take a few years to achieve and they need to plan and manage that. It is all about career coaching as opposed to placement. We emphasize it is less about the volume of contacts and more about the quality of contacts. Depending on what networks they plug into while on campus, it can change the trajectory of their careers and how they use career services.

P&Q: Who are your program’s primary competitors?

In some respects it is not an exact science on how we define our competitors. We can make those judgments based on rankings or geographic positioning, but we very much see ourselves as a global school, reaching out to that global marketplace. We are not just looking at London and Europe and define those schools as competitors. We look at the global marketplace. But we are also very collaborative as a school and have relationships with others that we could consider competitors.

We have partnerships with Columbia Business School in New York and Hong Kong University.We view those schools as our peers and look to forge collaborative partnerships with them. Our primary competitors are not just those in close geography. So we wouldn’t pinpoint a specific school to compete against. However, we do compete against certain factors.

We compete against the time employers are willing to give employees to study. We also compete against new programs coming online and into the market. But we mainly view ourselves as a collaborative institution.

P&Q: If you could make one thing happen in the EMBA marketplace, what would it be?

To me it is very much about taking the EMBA to that next level. It is about the development of great business leaders. It is training them to have great impact and value and see the way the entire world does business. It is about recognizing that our EMBA students are not just here to absorb information and knowledge. It is having the expectation they will go out and work and contribute positively to themselves, their organization and to society. We would teach them even more to have a profound impact on the world of business. Even more so, we would deliver the highest quality of faculty and experience. It is worth noting we are relatively a young school compared to many others in terms of years in the market and we will continue to develop and grow toward these aspirations.

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