How beneficial is an MBA to your career prospects in the Middle East?
Until recently, an MBA gained in the Middle East was barely worth the paper it was written on. However, a proliferation of courses taught on-the-ground by top business schools over the last five years has helped salvage the qualification's reputation in the region.
The first thing to point out is that these qualifications don't come cheap. London Business School charges $89.5k for its Dubai executive MBA; INSEAD's costs $90k; HEC Paris's new Doha-taught qualification comes in at €52.3k ($74.6k) and Cass Business School's Dubai-based EMBA is 34.5k ($54.8k).
At this price, you should expect results, but can this new breed of executive MBAs really help push you to the top of the banking career ladder in the Gulf?
Recent research suggests that, generally, local companies are still relatively underwhelmed by executive education. Manchester Business School and the Dubai International Academic City tried to assess the quality of these training courses this year (the first research of this kind), but, of a possible 26,000 respondents, only 537 training managers replied. Of those, 33.9% said the standard of executive education was good or very good, but 21.8% still described it as poor or very poor.
When it comes to qualifications favoured by financial services employers in the Middle East, the CFA has long been top of the list. The executive MBA still has some catching up to do, but more companies in the region are slowly waking up to its value, argues Ehsan Razavizadeh, regional director, MENA at Cass Business School.
"We're tailoring the course to cover subjects that local financial services organisations want to see, such as Islamic finance and private equity," he says. "For more senior roles local employers don't just want to see technical capabilities, they want softer skills like negotiation, leadership and an understanding of how business is done in the region. You get this with an MBA, whereas the CFA is purely technical."
The average experience level for Cass's Dubai EMBA is 11 years, and therefore most people taking an executive MBA are expecting to make the step up to senior management.
Of the 47 graduates in the Cass's most recent EMBA class, 12 were already in financial services and achieved a promotion, while four switched into the sector upon graduation, says Razavizadeh.
Nonetheless, executive search firms in Dubai remain slightly sceptical about the benefits of an MBA to your career prospects. Peter Greaves, director, head of financial markets at McArthur Murray in Dubai, says it's still very much a "luxury, rather than a requirement".
"For senior banking roles it's usually on the wish list, but seldom a requirement," he says. "In some cases, it can be a disadvantage as employers assume an MBA means they'll have to pay a candidate more."
