Expat education: distance learning ideal for broadening your horizons

The first cohort of students on the MSc in Major Programme Management course, who have just completed their studies, numbered 33, the second 53 – an increase of more than 50 cent. About half the students are from the UK. The others come from far and wide. North America, South Africa, Australia...

Mainly they come from the private sector, but ￡1 billion-plus programmes are certainly not a private sector monopoly. One Said student worked for the International Atomic Energy Authority. Others have come from high-spending London boroughs.

With a median age of around forty, the students all have first degrees, or the equivalent, and about a third already have MBAs. But they need the additional management know-how that Said can give them.

The two-year course is designed to enable them to continue their careers uninterrupted, while devoting about ten hours a week to developing the intellectual and financial skills needed to manage. The course consists of eight taught courses, each one requiring an intensive four-day programme in Oxford, and a 10,000-word dissertation – perhaps, though not necessarily, focussing on issues specific to their own workplaces.

"Every student is different, with different major spending programmes for which they need to prepare," says Chapman. "But they are not doing their studies in isolation. Each student has a tutor at an Oxford college as a mentor. They also form contacts will fellow students that span the globe – from Sydney to Santiago, in the case of two of our students. And we learn from them. We have recently had to tweak our course as a result of input from a student who was working on a major development programme in Afghanistan."

If the Said programme specifically targets big spenders, there are management courses geared to just about every manager in every sector of the economy, with new courses becoming available every year and more and more universities and business schools recognising that this is a market they should try to tap.

For Jo Downing, a clinical coding manager at King's Hospital in London, a MA in Management Studies from Kingston University in Surrey was just the fillip she needed in her NHS career. She already had a degree in business studies and modern languages, but despite more than ten years of hands-on experience of hospital management, realised that a masters degree offered the likeliest route to future promotion. Since qualifying earlier this year, she has already applied for a position two grades above her current job.

"There is a big drive within the NHS to improve efficiency and effectiveness," says Downing. "King's Hospital recognised that I would be more valuable to them if I was better qualified, so I received a modicum of financial help with the funding for the course. I also got study leave when appropriate."

The Kingston course took three years to complete and consisted of a postgraduate diploma followed by a dissertation. Attendance at the university was necessary about once a month, which was not a problem for Downing, who lived in the vicinity. But many of her fellow students came from much further afield. Some worked in the private sector, while others worked for local government, the NHS or other public bodies.

"It was quite a while since my days as a full-time university student, and it took a while to pick up the habits of study again," says Downing. "But Kingston was good at helping us structure our studies and get the most out of individual assignments. Its many online resources also made it easy to study at home at the weekends."

If at one level she was going back to school, she was also acquiring management skills that stood her in good stead in her day job. "I wasn’t interested in purely theoretical learning," says Downing. "I deliberately sought out assignments that would have a practical application in a hospital environment – and my employers appreciated that."

One such assignment helped her develop management tools for quantifying the workloads of different hospital workers – a perennial challenge within the notoriously complex administrative structure of the NHS. Another led to some improved procedures in relation to stem-cell transplants.

Outstanding managers are like gold-dust, whether they are overseeing the expenditure of billions of pounds of money or simply making hospitals run more efficiently, to the benefit of patients. If they need to spend bit of time away from the office studying the art of management, it is generally a sound investment.

Case study: Chiara Dottorini McCormack, 37, a programme manager at ST Micro-Electronics, Bristol, has just completed an MSc in Major Programme Management with the Said Business School in Oxford.

"I took my first degree at the University of Milan, moved to England and have been working for my present company, ST Micro-Electronics in Bristol, for just over ten years. I am both a team leader and a major programme manager, in charge of developing a software programme costing millions of pounds.

“The main reason I wanted to take a masters degree was to acquire new skills and competences that would both help me deliver the current programme successfully and further my long-term career. I discussed options with various business schools and universities and, after careful consideration, ruled out the MBA option. Too much of the content of MBA programmes dealt with broad-brush strategic issues that were not relevant to my career. I wanted something more targeted, concentrating on the practicalities of financing a major programme rather than on the kind of financial issues that dominate the banking world.

“The Said Business School’s MSc in Major Programme Management was perfectly tailored to my needs. I had to meet the costs of the course myself, as my company does not fund such courses for its employers as a matter a policy, but it has been money well spent. It has been hard work at times – I was told I would need to devote about ten hours a week to the course, but seem to have spent closer to fifteen – but the content was first-class, both challenging and focussed.

“As well as studying from home, I had to come to Oxford every two or three months for an intensive four-day session of classes and seminars with fellow students on the course. They were an interesting lot, ranging in age from thirty to fifty, and it was useful to swap experiences with other major programme managers, even ones working in different fields to me. Informal get-togethers in the evening were often as productive as the classes themselves.

“The final element of the course was a dissertation on a subject of our choice. I chose a general topic, major programme success, rather than something specific to my company, but the course as a whole has certainly benefited me in my day-to-day work, notably in re-engineering the software of the company.

“As for the future, I am certainly far more marketable, now that I have got a masters degree under my belt, and the feedback from recruiters has been very positive. But there have been other benefits, too. The course has opened my mind to more strategic ways of looking at old problems. It has given me far greater self-confidence in dealing with people in senior management positions. Last but not least, in putting me in touch with other high-level professionals in other fields, it has significantly broadened my horizons."

Case study: Henk Nagel, 38, Director of Professional Services, Northern Region, for the software company CommVault, is doing an Msc in Management with Ashridge Business School

"I took my first degree in information technology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and am now based in the same city, working for CommVault, a multinational software company. I used to be director of customer services, which was when I acquired my interest in management as a vital tool for a company striving to improve its overall performance.

"In view of my executive responsibilities, it seemed a good idea to acquire a masters degree of some kind, so I weighed my options carefully.

“The problem with a traditional MBA, as I established through discussions with a colleague, is that its content was likely to be overly academic. I wanted a course with a more practical application to my working environment, where a lot of day-to-day problems have a high technical content.

“I had done a short internship with Ashridge Business School in 2009 and been impressed with the standard of their teaching and with their practical approach to management problems. In 2010, with the support of my employers, who agreed to pay half my fees, I enrolled in Ashridge’s new virtual Masters in Management. There was supposed to be a few days’ face-to-face teaching in the first part of the programme, but Ashridge waived this in view of the time I had already spent at the business school. I appreciated their flexibility.

“I have now completed the first element of the masters degree, a three-term postgraduate certificate. There were three separate modules, each taking three months and involving two distinct assignments. It was a significant time commitment – around 15 to 20 hours a week, studying at home in the evenings and at weekends – and with a wife and two young children, I had to manage my time very carefully. Luckily, that is a skill I have always had. Without it, I think I would have struggled.

“Mainly, I was working on my own. There was some scope for interacting with fellow course members through learning groups and on social media sites, but the Ashridge course focuses on individual rather than group assignments, and that suited me fine. I work in quite a specialist field, with challenges specific to it.

“Even though I have only completed the first part of the course, I have already been able to reap the benefits at work. The services side of a company like ours tends to be seen more as a cost rather than as a potential source of profit. I hope that, by analysing our operations in a different way, I have been to improve our bottom-line performance.

“As I move on to the two remaining parts of the course, the three-term diploma and the special project, I want to broaden my horizons into general management and achieve a greater comfort level when dealing with issues of strategy and finance."

Executive education: transport minister or chicken farmer, there's a right way to manage

Although most of their students tend to come from the private sector, Ashridge has identified several public-sector areas of work, notably the health service, where enhanced management skills are likely to be in demand.

"Take GPs," says Delwes. "Ten years ago, they would have spent 99 per cent of their time exercising their clinical skills. With the re-organisation of the health service, they are going to have to learn to be managers as well as clinicians, understanding budgets as well as anatomy. Courses like ours can help them achieve that."

If the MBA is a familiar part of the education landscape, and can involve some quite rarefied theoretical study, masters degrees in management have a more practical relevance. "People doing MBS are typically investing in their intended future, whereas those who enrol for degrees in management are investing for the present," says Delwes. "They may have been frustrated by the day-to-day challenges of creating an effective working environment, and want the tools to improve their performance."

The Masters in Management is the first 'virtual’ course offered by Ashridge and, in terms of content, is learning-driven rather than curriculum-driven – in other words, students need to relate their studies to their own working situations, rather than get bogged down in abstract theory.

"A lot of distance learning courses require long, uninterrupted hours in front of a computer," Delwes explains. "We want to vary the mix and get students to apply what they have learnt to their own workplaces, particularly during the special project with which the course concludes."

If Ashridge has identified a lucrative niche in the market, it is not alone. More and more UK universities now offer masters degrees in management, delivered either on campus, through online courses or through educational models which blend the two.

"The MBA may remain the gold standard in business circles, but the value of strategic management skills is increasingly being acknowledged," says Barry Blackham, head of curriculum and student experience at the Derby Business School, part of the University of Derby. "There are just so many people in different stages of their careers who need to be taught to look at problems in the workplace in the round, not just make things up as they go along."

The Derby Business School has a proven track record of delivering online degrees, adding new courses every year. Its MSc in Strategic Management has proven particularly popular in southern Africa, notably Botswana, where there are 45 students enrolled on the course, and Malawi, where there are 80.

Whereas UK students enrolled on the course study entirely online, students in Botswana and Malawi benefit from what Blackham calls "the flying faculty model". Most of the time students have to work on their own, from textbooks or online materials; but two or three times a year, teachers from Derby will fly out to Africa to field questions and deliver face-to-face classes. In countries where internet usage is not widespread, the human touch is often vital in helping students achieve their full potential.

"They are a very mixed lot, and at very different stages in their career," says Blackham. "One of the students is the Malawi Minister of Transport, one of the most senior members of the government. Another is a chicken farmer. NGOs, we have found, are also prepared to fund key staff in their extra-curricular studies. But, if the students have arrived at us via different routes, they all seem to benefit from the course, mainly because it has direct application to their work."

One of the key modules in the course, which typically takes between two and three years, is Decision Analysis, which focuses on long-term strategic planning, particularly its financial aspects. "You’re not going to turn people who are not mathematically gifted into brilliant statisticians," says Blackham. "But what you can do is help them find their way around statistical reports prepared by others, and give them the intellectual confidence to deal with accountants, economic analysts and the like."

And it is not just individual managers and would-be managers benefiting from the new trends in executive education. Large and medium-sized companies are increasingly turning to business schools to help them resolve organisational and managerial issues that would once have been handled in-house.

'Our clients include some of the top FTSE companies, as well as major companies in the USA, Australia, Canada and other countries,’ says Bill Shedden, director of the Centre for Customised Executive Development at the Cranfield School of Management, part of Cranfield University in Hertfordshire, the UK’s only wholly postgraduate university.

Companies which use Cranfield’s services are typically looking for a strategy for developing a cadre of middle and senior managers or for implementing major organisational change. "They don’t expect us to tell them what they do," says Shedden. "They expect us to work with them to come up with solutions that are tailored to their needs. Those solutions, increasingly, will involve such teaching tools as network learning and 'webinars’, where you can work face-to-face with someone on the other side of the world."

A once leisurely world of residential staff colleges and week-long conferences at five-star hotels has been superseded by a much more concentrated form of executive education"Companies are under pressure to show tangible results quickly,’ says Shedden. 'They have also had to cut down on travel costs and are reluctant to let key staff take time off for study purposes."

It is a fast-changing environment and, as Shedden acknowledges, business schools have to learn from the mistakes of the past. "With the emergence of the net, a lot of schools thought e-learning was the future and put a lot of effort into developing appropriate online material. But that’s where they came unstuck. All they were basically offering was sophisticated books which were readable on a computer. But how many senior bankers or businessmen would have the time or inclination to read such books?"

Flexibility is the new by-word, with increasing emphasis on interactive forms of learning. A company in the United States or Australia which deployed Cranfield’s services might start off with a short immersion period, with managers studying podcasts and online material, but after that the group would be as important as the individual in the learning process.

"We recently did a full-blown business simulation with a company in Miami," says Shedden. "The entire exercise was virtual, with nobody having to move from their desks. But it was a huge success in education terms."

In a complex business world, learning the art of good management has never been harder. The good news is that there have probably never been more diverse or innovative ways to teach managers to manage.

Case Study: Joanne Farrugia

Senior manager, Learning and Development at Australia New Zealand (ANZ) Bank in Melbourne, who has overseen the implementation of a Driving Operations Performance Programme delivered by the UK-based Cranfield School of Management.

"ANZ Bank is a fast-expanding company operating in over thirty countries and employing around 45,000 staff. Our aim is to grow our presence in the Asia Pacific region while also focusing on existing business and opportunities in Australia and New Zealand.

In 2009, we identified the need to develop our operations through the creation of an Operations Academy framework and sought an appropriate business school partner to help us deliver that objective. We chose the Cranfield School of Management because of its strong track record in customised executive education and, in particular, because of its expertise in the field of online learning – essential when dealing with a work force as geographically dispersed as ours.

The blended Driving Operations Performance Programme, which Cranfield devised in consultation with us, contained three basic elements: an initial learning phase, in which participants would study articles and podcasts through an online portal; a facilitator-led face-to-face three-day workshop incorporating business simulations and other exercises attuned to a financial context; and a special project, geared to embedding what had previously been learnt and giving it a practical application.

The whole programme took 16 weeks to deliver and we have been running it more or less continuously for the last eighteen months, with cohorts of 20 participants at a time, subdivided into four groups of five. The participants have typically been middle managers from all sections of the bank’s operations.

The beauty of the cohort system, and of the particular learning model devised by Cranfield, is that ANZ staff in Australia have been able to work alongside staff in New Zealand and Asia. This has helped develop strong networks within the ANZ family, with people doing similar jobs thousands of miles apart able to forge strong collaborative solutions to common problems.

One thing we have learnt during the whole process is that it is very important for senior executives at the bank to take an active interest in the programme. Participants who have excelled, and been able to apply what they have learnt to their day-to-day work, have been personally recognised, and we hold special end-of-course ceremonies to underline the importance of the programme to ANZ as a whole.

Our customers have also benefited from our involvement with Cranfield. The special project with which the programme concludes has helped managers within the cohorts re-engineer their customer-facing operations and draw up new strategies for delivering a better service. This has had a healthy knock-on effect, for example in reducing the time it takes our branches to process individual transactions. In a results-driven business like banking, any learning programmes have to deliver outcomes which are clear for all to see – and we like to think we have achieved that."

This article was originally published in the Telegraph, Weekly World Edition