And now: the very first MBA for the recruitment industry

If you work in financial services recruitment and you aspire to taking an MBA, your time has come.

The first MBA for the recruitment industry has been launched.

Run by Henley Business School in collaboration with the Association of Professional Staffing Companies, it costs 28k, is flexible over three years, and will instruct you on things like the, "motivation and the psychological contract for people working within the international recruitment industry."

Anne Swain, CEO of APSco, explains.

"The people taking this course are going to be managers of recruitment businesses or recruitment teams. They will have come up through the recruitment ranks," she says.

There won't be any modules specific to financial services recruitment, but there will be lots of modules applicable to it. For example, attention will be given to how to motivate people without simply increasing their commission, how to negotiate contracts with RPOs and how to put in place the correct infrastructure to make a recruitment firm function as it should.

Will doing this MBA make any difference to your career prospects?

Maybe not, but it might help you progress within an existing employer.

I have only once been asked to find someone with an MBA by a client in executive search and I'd say that easily fewer than 5% of the financial services search consultants working in London have one," reflects Simon Hughes at HighView Search, a headhunter of headhunters.

Doing an MBA won't make you a better headhunter, reflects Hughes. However, it might make you a better manager. It might also make it easier for you to get an HR job in a bank, assuming this is where your aspirations lie.