Dr Vanita Bhoola is the Assistant Dean & Associate Professor – Executive MBA & Executive Education at SP Jain School of Global Management. She provides Academic Leadership to the Mumbai / India and Global EMBA batches (Face-to-Face and Online) and promotes a positive culture of learning. Spend time Strategic Thinking and Planning to help improve the Program in consultation team across the multi-city Campuses. She is an accomplished Senior Management Professional with Academia and Management Consulting. With more than 24 years of experience in consulting and teaching, she has published articles in reputed journals. She is the only woman representation who was interviewed from India amongst 21 women from 17 countries for the Book published Perspectives of Women in Project Management.
The 21st century has seen multiple global black swan events resulting in a dynamic work environment. The tremendous evolution of technology and automation using AI/ML has caused job security concerns.
Organizations in turn are facing challenges to get the right talent both in managerial and leadership roles which adapt quickly to changes in technology and finance in the global markets.
Domain experts eventually hit a glass ceiling and tapering career curves after a quick initial take-off. The glass ceiling is typically a vacuum in the understanding of other than domain skill one has educated for.
The domain knowledge education obtained by education and years of experience cannot provide accelerated growth to an individual in the corporate world. A manager today is expected to know various disciplines like finance, operations, compliance, risk management, and many more such domains to be effective in designing a product or service for the company. Thoughts and collaborations from other functions like sales, marketing, customer service, logistics, and competition strategy among many factors are the keys to a robust, sustaining, and profitable product or service in the market. While it is impossible to be an expert in each of these areas, a certain understanding at a level where effective communication and collaboration can be done with domain experts from those areas is a requirement. It is not possible to work and deliver a product or a service in a silo.
The corporate environment requires such individuals for bringing out relevant products/services and being ahead of the competition. For example, A technology project manager will need a firm understanding of the business function they support to optimize the product they are delivering. A customer-facing application should have easy to use UI, as well as must be secure enough to comply with government and company regulations. It must also be secure to protect consumer privacy.
Management education bridges this vacuum and brings in considerable improvement in one’s outlook towards important strategic and tactical skills outside an individual’s core skills. Companies seek such multi-faceted multi-talented domain experts and possess the right combination of business and leadership skills and are ready to be part of succession planning.
As a part of the continuous learning process, organizations too sponsor high potential candidates for executive education, EMBA being one of them. Some of the factors that help organizations nominate candidates for such programs are the potential, business requirement, financial requirement. The benefit to such sponsoring organizations depends on the sustained competitive advantage of such graduates being able to find the solution to business issues immediately while they are studying. Furthermore, the digital economy demands a specialist manager having a behavioural attitude of a generalist manager to manage people and the work environment.
There is an increasing trend for domains to overlap bringing competition from domains that were earlier complementary or symbiotic. For example, India has opened up doors of banking from traditional banking licenses to NBFCs and Microfinance. Products like WhatsApp are now also in the market for UPI payments in the Indian market. OLA and UBER have now become a competition to traditional means of owning transportation like cars. There are many such examples in and around us in the market where such overlap of domains is observed.
In such rapidly evolving business strategies to enter new markets, geographies, or business lines, the company’s management layer needs to be in a mindset that will adapt to such changing scenarios. Today we see conglomerates where there are several lines of business from Automotive, Finance, Power, and many more industries. There is a need within each company for the management layer to be well versed with optimization of cost and bringing innovation to its existing and new product lines. Collaboration within these various group companies to reduce the overall cost of operations, manufacturing, raw material procurement, supply chain, and servicing can be brought about to bring in efficiencies of scales.
Take for example the latest venture into Electronic Vehicles (EV). An automotive company needs steel, supply chain and for its long term, sustainable business needs a viable cost-effective electricity and transmission company to collaborate with for releasing a product that will have an ecosystem of not just the product but the associated service to go with it, fuel in this case being electricity.
Such complex ventures need a project manager to be able to collaborate not just within their companies but also without factoring in the cost of sustaining the product to be attractive to customers in the long term.
The Executive MBA degree is pretty versatile for such seasoned working professionals who already have significant exposure to corporate work culture and environment. It offers an opportunity to both individuals and companies to get the requisite training for the extra mile required for taking the next big leap. Experienced professionals get business, managerial, and leadership training for bigger and better roles in their current industry. It also helps them to participate in larger projects with added skills.
The companies benefit by training their key projects team with these skills for effective project management and inputs from various key stakeholders. The EMBA has a flexible delivery model in the classroom or distance, online and part-time modes. This benefits both the company as well as the individuals and makes it a win-win proposition for career fast-forwarding of the employee as well as innovations and complex products/services for the company or stepping into a new business line.
The EMBA program sets one’s career track in fast-forward mode. No career breaks are required to get the degree, the programs are designed around work schedules.
The diversified and dynamic learning environment created by EMBA students is a result of their extensive experience. Participants get a one-of-a-kind chance to share and learn from one another while also building crucial networks.
EMBA is an investment that pays off through high networking, peer learning, and knowledge sharing for opportunities for career growth.
Surveys conducted by the EMBA exit council 2020, revealed a 14.1 percent increase in compensation after the completion of the program. In addition, 39 percent received a promotion and 53 percent received an increased salary during the program.
Salary increments, role change, career track change, and entrepreneurship are what students get picked up for post the EMBA experience. EMBA is a much sought-after program as it brings flexibility, affordability, an add-on to current knowledge, and most importantly peer learning and network, which is the mantra for successful professional growth.