MBA Courses for Working Professionals: A Booster Dose for Your Career

Summary: A working professional can boost career prospects and earning ability through an MBA course for working professionals. This time-tested course can additionally equip one to shift across verticals, industries, and geographies and scale the corporate ladder more rapidly. It strengthens all-around personal abilities and skills, enhances one’s innate abilities, improves leadership potential, and allows an individual to flower. There are many options in terms of duration and course content. But remember, an MBA is not a magic wand. The secret of success lies in how one utilises the newly acquired knowledge and skills it gives you.

If you are a young professional in an early phase of your career, you must have considered adding a postgraduate or Master’s degree in Business Administration to your list of qualifications. An MBA course for working professionals is widely considered one of the best methods for accelerating your mid-career growth graph. The degree is given weightage by management in recruitment and promotion decisions because it is the only course focused on equipping you with the specific skills required to succeed in business.

Let’s look at some of the advantages of doing an MBA. Consequently, we will also talk about the Accelerated Management Program offered by Harappa education.

Direct benefits

An MBA from a well-recognized institution will help in:

Fast-forwarding career prospects: The degree will give you an edge over others and can influence how an employer perceives you. It will mark you out as one with upgraded qualifications and skills.
Significantly increasing pay scales: In most cases, completing an MBA course for working professionals will open doors to additional responsibilities and lead to an increase in remuneration sooner rather than later.
Career Advancement: An MBA course helps in advancing your career prospects faster than contemporaries without a similar qualification.
Good Investment: An MBA course is considered as a “Good Investment” and improves your salary and career prospects.

Enhancing overall skills

By successfully completing an MBA course, a working professional also stands to benefit in other ways.

Attending business school will sharpen one’s existing abilities and bring in new skills. It will prepare a person to think and act differently, enabling them to gain self-confidence and win respect both at work and in personal life.

After doing an MBA course, a working professional is well-equipped to:

Handle stress and change: A business degree teaches one how to manage people and situations better and make it easier to face challenges.
Assume higher levels of responsibility: The sound grounding in leadership skills will enable one to move more smoothly up the corporate ladder.
Improve finance-related skills: An MBA course will cover the basic principles of financial management and equip one with the ability to plan cash flows, budgets, and allocations which are essential functions in any department.
Strengthen strategic thinking and planning ability: The degree will also enhance the ability to take a long-term view, think ahead, and plan work to accomplish predefined goals over time.
Enhance the ability to discuss, communicate and strike deals: Though not part of direct course work, an MBA can also hone soft skills such as getting the message across or ensuring you get what you want. Learning to be good at communication and developing strong negotiating skills can help gain respect from those leads and win appreciation from those reports to.
Develop motivation and self-discipline: An MBA enables one to find the motivation to handle difficult assignments and the rigour to complete any assigned task regularly and systematically.
Seamlessly shift departments or even industries: The acquired standard business principles make it feasible to consider career shifts – to new functional areas, geographies, or business verticals.

Importance of work experience

Research into the history of MBA indicates that the degree was initially seen as equivalent to any postgraduate degree, hence best completed soon after graduation. It has subsequently evolved, and there exists a broad spectrum of specially curated MBA courses for working professionals.

These offer training in the generalised skills needed by senior-level personnel in an organisation, as opposed to the deepening of knowledge in a specific field that most Master’s degrees generally entail. Though there is no hard and fast rule, it is believed that the best time to enrol for an MBA is after gaining practical experience in a working environment for between three and five years.

Full-time is only one of the options

There are many ways of acquiring this degree, and it is good to weigh the different types of MBA courses for working professionals before enrolling.

In most circumstances, a full-time course from one of the best business schools and/or top universities is the preferred way to gain maximum benefit from an MBA. Yet, this is not possible for many and sometimes not desirable. The very high cost of a full-time course at a premier institution is usually a deterrent. For many, a full-time course will also mean foregoing income for the study period.

Part-time courses, online learning, or a hybrid mode of classes are some of the alternatives that can be looked at. These can be of varying durations – from a few months to 2-3 years, or in certain cases, can even be customised to one’s requirements. There is also the Executive MBA, which is mostly designed for those with greater work experience.

Choosing your specialisation

Varied subject options are also available. It is better to select an area of specialisation related to your area of work or a field you would like to enter. One can earn an MBA in specific sectors such as E-commerce, Rural & Agri-Business, Pharmaceuticals & Healthcare, or Entrepreneurship.

The course could be related to your skill sets and focus on Business Analytics & Big Data, Supply Chain, Logistics, International Business, Human Resources, Operations, Finance, Marketing, and so on.

An Accelerated Management Program (AMP) offered by Harappa School of Leadership (HSOL) is carefully designed for ambitious working professionals looking for opportunities in their career growth. The Program enables the access to the roles that are high-growth and are in-demand across products, marketing, data and consulting in most of the Indian organisations.

Final Thought

It is good to remember that each one must discover which of the various options works best in their case. It should also be clear that an MBA course for a working professional is only an enabler, not a magic wand; how well it acts as a career accelerator boils down to one’s ability to take advantage of the newly acquired knowledge and skills.