School Close Ups

Five of the top ten desired employers of MBA’s this year are consumer technology companies. Long-standing service firms like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman Sachs and Blackstone were joined by likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Ideo.

Jobs are up and salaries, too. According to separate surveys of employers and graduates released by the Graduate Management Admission Council there is a “pronounced improvement in the job market for business school graduates,” said Gregg Schoenfeld, GMAC director of research and author of the graduates’ survey report. “Based on job offers, hiring is up in all industries, and more than half of the students who were looking for work had job offers two months before graduation. Last year, that figure was lower than one-third.”

“An interesting aspect of globalization is that it questions the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon business model,” says Andrew Kakabadse, Professor of International Management Development at Cranfield Business School in the United Kingdom. “In my view Chinese and Indian corporations put the traditional western ways of managing, leading and organizing to the test and chances are that the next generation of influences on the economic world will be Indian and Chinese,” predicts Kakabadse in “knowledge@ASB”, the management publication of the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

MBA providers need to be flexible and adjust to the ever changing economy and its innovations. One necessary offer was to introduce an online MBA, where students study off-campus via the Internet. Those programmes have now had a few years of experience and MBA Channel wanted to see what the benefits and downsides of those programmes are.

Don’t be misled by Australian sunshine, beaches and the surfing ads that you might have seen on television. Australians are hard working people and have succeeded in creating great wealth with their diverse business ventures. No wonder, that Australian education is valued highly in neighbouring Asian countries and education has become an important export market for the Australian economy. One of these success stories is the University of Queensland Business School.

The ability to culturally adapt is regarded as crucial for the success of the engagement of a manager for a foreign market. Therefore HR experts aim at finding both, highly adaptable employees and trainings for them that prepare the future expatriates as well as possible to deal with foreign customs and cultures. But is adaptability really the sole key factor for success in going abroad?

Coincidentally a year after Lehman Brothers has collapsed, INSEAD, one of the worldwide leading business schools, INSEAD celebrates its 50th anniversary and it is using the occasion to demonstrate to the world that its curriculum and the alumni it has produced, have indeed been a blessing to the business world rather than a curse.

Anne Scrutton is a very busy lady these days. The Marketing Executive at Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM) in Sydney now has 15 per cent more applicants for MBA programs than she did last autumn. The reason is, of course, the prevailing economic crisis.