Experience no bar as students rush to join upskilling frenzy

MBA students now are very different to those of a decade ago. Traditionally, MBA cohorts have consisted of professionals with five or six years of experience under their belt and looking to take their career to the next level.

Today, the cohort is much more diverse. There are still the mid-level career professionals looking to move up in their organisations. However, there are more people undertaking MBAs without any previous work experience, or who are looking to take their experience and shift into whole new sectors or upskill in unfamiliar issues and new fields.

Carla Dias Wadewitz, the director of Flinders University’s new MBA, says the university made a decision in 2021 to accept students with work experience as well as those straight from undergraduate study.

‘‘I was curious to see how that was going to work, because we have two different cohorts to cater for. It’s actually going really well, because you have the newbies who have just graduated and have all that fresh knowledge, and then you have the more mature students who obviously have work experience coming in, and that mix is working really well,’’ says Dias Wadewitz.

‘‘For example, we have students that have just graduated from accounting, and they are into bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. The experienced accountants that are coming to the MBA are like ‘what is that?’ And then they start talking about NFTs and tokenisation. It is very beneficial to have this mix in class,’’ she says.

The pace of change and expectations on leaders to be across issues such as diversity and inclusion, cybersecurity, supply chain and artificial intelligence are also helping to attract a new kind of cohort for management degrees.

Associate Professor Stuart Crispin, executive dean of the College of Business and Economics at the University of Tasmania, says although many students were aware of the topics, many hadn’t experienced them. ‘‘For example, they’re aware that climate change and climate mitigation is going to change the nature of organisations but they may not have directly had that experience themselves,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s probably what I would see at the moment with our cohorts – they are people who are not subject to the change, but see that change is coming and are using this opportunity to move into those areas.’’

Staying ahead of the curve is a running theme. Dias Wadewitz says Flinders University took the strategic move to embed Industry 4.0 and 5.0, as well as sustainability and innovation into its MBA course design.

‘‘I think that really excited a lot of students – to not wait one or two years – and to see the MBA as an opportunity to upskill in these areas that they had never seen before,’’ she says.

She said some students were unfamiliar with technology’s frontier concepts such as big data analytics, the internet of things and 3D printing.

‘‘They have never heard about these concepts, although they’re surrounded by them. Mostly they tell me, ‘Carla, we’re surrounded by these things, but I never thought about them in this way and how businesses use these tools and capture our data and help us customise our projects and things like that’,’’ Dias Wadewitz says.

The emphasis and exploration of new industries is shared by Professor Aron O’Cass, Dean of La Trobe Business School. ‘‘We have a lot of campuses in regional areas and we’re seeing a lot of growth in these areas – new industries and businesses that need skilled managers to succeed,’’ O’Cass says.

The La Trobe Business School is a signatory to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), and a PRME Champion Business School. This is a commitment the business school has made to equip today’s business students with the understanding and ability to deliver change tomorrow.

‘‘This means our graduates are not only learning about new industries, they are also learning about the social and environmental impact of those industries and their role in creating sustainable change. It’s really exciting for our students – they are exploring new ground,’’ O’Cass says. A key message from the universities is that you don’t need to wait until you hit a career milestone before investing in an MBA. Professor Maryam Omari, Edith Cowan University’s executive dean of the School of Business and Law, says the best time to undertake study varied from individual to individual. ‘‘The School of Business and Law has many mature age students who start or return to study while they are juggling parenting and work. On paper, it might seem impractical to add study to the mix, but these students are almost always successful,’’ Omari says.

‘‘I myself did my three postgraduate degrees while I was working full-time in industry and teaching part-time at university with two children under the age of 10. This posed many logistical and other challenges at the time but I found that my studies were helping my work, and my work in senior management roles was helping my studies. The two, hand in hand, opened new career opportunities for me.’’

O’Cass says he would tell students not to allow a lack of experience – or perceived lack of experience – to get in the way of doing a management course.

‘‘Open your minds. We work with you to ensure you have the skills employers are looking for. If you’re doing applied finance, we work with you on how to present information back to the business. If you’re in marketing, we look at how you design and manage brand. It’s accessible and it’s

practical,’’ O’Cass says.

Crispin says a sense of frustration with one’s experience in management could be a trigger for change. ‘‘If they are open to different approaches to managing, then an MBA could be the next step,’’ he says. Dias Wadewitz says several MBA students return to study because they realise they are not passionate about their career. ‘‘Maybe you want to build your own business, to change your lifestyle, or you want to launch something innovative – then I would say that an MBA is a good starting point to acquire that breadth of managerial knowledge that you need to then take that dream into the world,’’ she says.

Omari says there is no typical management student these days. ‘‘At the postgraduate level, our students are either retraining for a new occupation or upskilling to progress their career in their current field. They range from those who haven’t been long in the workforce through to CEOs,’’ she says.

O’Cass agrees that the cohort undertaking management degrees was increasingly diverse. ‘‘A number of our students are also among the first generation in their families to attend a university. There’s huge diversity in background, experience and what students expect from a management degree’’.

Much of this diversity can be put down to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crispin says the COVID-19 years have given people the time and space to think about making that big career change or to build on existing skills.

‘‘We’re definitely seeing a different kind of cohort,’’ he says. ‘‘People are coming out of a whole range of different skills-based areas.’’

With MBAs doing so much more heavy lifting, the emphasis on previous experience has changed.

‘‘At the postgraduate level, we have programs that have work experience requirements for entry at certain levels, and others which don’t. At ECU, you will be hard-pressed to find a student who does not have some work experience as a supervisor, team leader or in a line management capacity,’’ Omari says.

Crispin says some amount of management experience is a part of every student. ‘‘We’ve all experienced management in some way, whether it’s as a manager or being managed. So, I think it’s more that they’ve got something to reflect on. But I don’t see that as essential, particularly given we are seeing so much of a transitional educational market at the moment. People are making that leap into new areas and I think a lot of them have no more than basic frontline leadership experience,’’ he says.^AFR