Most business schools have about ten disciplines: finance, accounting, economics, decision analysis, operations, ethics, communications, leadership and organizational behavior, marketing, and strategy. Each of those disciplines decide roughly what it means to be a business “master” of their content. If one “passes” those courses, one has, roughly defined, achieved a “master’s” level of “business administration.”
As for the skills thing. If you mean skills to get in an MBA program, strong reading and writing skills, good math skills, good study habits, good team skills, and relatively high energy are necessary to do well.
As for learning skills during an MBA program, well, one other responder has said there are none. I disagree. If you go to a strong school with a heavy emphasis on case method you will be asked to learn the following skills: working hard, forming conclusions from data (inductive logic), working in learning teams, and striving to influence people in group settings. A good case curriculum will present you with as many as 600 current business problems with background data and theoretical frameworks and ask you to debate your peers (forget your instructor) about the issue and demand some kind of decision-making. Every case class is a mini-leadership laboratory: can I present my analysis cogently and concisely and persuasively? If your CLASSMATES aren’t listening, that’s a big red flag.
Once an MBA graduates, and realize “an MBA is not an MBA is not an MBA”—they vary widely—one must learn the specific systems of the company they go to work for. They won’t have the company specific skills until they learn how to get things done in that company. Frequently, if the MBA is well-trained, they will be able to begin influencing processes right away. (I did that in my first job in international banking-writing computer programs to do things the bank wanted done faster and thereby modifying existing processes.)
Influence, leadership, team participating, team building, communicating, political skills, process innovation, industry specific analytic tools, strategy formulation, broader galvanizing SKILLS will continue to be developed IF the individual is a learning person and IF the organization is a learning organization.
MBA graduates from quality programs have knowledge and skills. Some of those skills were strong as they entered the MBA program and were further developed in school. The learning curve in a good MBA program is unique to each individual: for some it’s steep, for others, not so much.
I hope this helps. One way to “test” your “MBA-ready-or-not” skills is to take the GMAT and see how it turns out. In the end, I assert “thinking” is a skill, a highly important skill—and it’s useless unless married to execution skills as noted above.
As for the skills thing. If you mean skills to get in an MBA program, strong reading and writing skills, good math skills, good study habits, good team skills, and relatively high energy are necessary to do well.
As for learning skills during an MBA program, well, one other responder has said there are none. I disagree. If you go to a strong school with a heavy emphasis on case method you will be asked to learn the following skills: working hard, forming conclusions from data (inductive logic), working in learning teams, and striving to influence people in group settings. A good case curriculum will present you with as many as 600 current business problems with background data and theoretical frameworks and ask you to debate your peers (forget your instructor) about the issue and demand some kind of decision-making. Every case class is a mini-leadership laboratory: can I present my analysis cogently and concisely and persuasively? If your CLASSMATES aren’t listening, that’s a big red flag.
Once an MBA graduates, and realize “an MBA is not an MBA is not an MBA”—they vary widely—one must learn the specific systems of the company they go to work for. They won’t have the company specific skills until they learn how to get things done in that company. Frequently, if the MBA is well-trained, they will be able to begin influencing processes right away. (I did that in my first job in international banking-writing computer programs to do things the bank wanted done faster and thereby modifying existing processes.)
Influence, leadership, team participating, team building, communicating, political skills, process innovation, industry specific analytic tools, strategy formulation, broader galvanizing SKILLS will continue to be developed IF the individual is a learning person and IF the organization is a learning organization.
MBA graduates from quality programs have knowledge and skills. Some of those skills were strong as they entered the MBA program and were further developed in school. The learning curve in a good MBA program is unique to each individual: for some it’s steep, for others, not so much.
I hope this helps. One way to “test” your “MBA-ready-or-not” skills is to take the GMAT and see how it turns out. In the end, I assert “thinking” is a skill, a highly important skill—and it’s useless unless married to execution skills as noted above.
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