I have an employee who has approached me about funding an MBA for him. No problems in doing this, he’s hardworking etc…as long as it will bring £15K+ of benefit!

Having not done one, are they still relevant? Are there any alternatives? Do they provide anything exceptional that cannot be learned from peers / management?

I’ll be doing some of my own Googling, but would imagine that there should be some on here who would be able to offer some thoughts?

TIA!

We did this for someone once.  It worked well for them as they went on to a nice higher paid job 🙂

Apart from that it really did look like it worked in terms of what they could do and how they did things.  Whether or not they would still fit in your org in the same sort of position is a different question.

Cost is 15k + his expected pay rise once completed! 🙂

Do you not have any better ways of investing £15k in your business that might provide a greater return? I’d tell the cheeky beggar to dig into his own pockets. From my experience of working alongside folk doing an MBA it is of no practical benefit.

If it means you retain him, there’s £30k of benefit already – at least.

However, i’d be more sceptical about actual returns from the MBA content itself. I’ve worked with a lot of people who got MBAs and I never saw any direct benefits in the workplace. Getting an MBA does require a high degree of commitment, and it’s usually linked to a certain amount of ambition, so if the sort of employer you want values those things, it’s useful to have it on the CV. Which is a benefit for your employee, not for you. There may be other development opportunities you can offer them that more directly help both parties.

If he’s a valuable employee and you wish to retain him, then it could be good VFM.

But do you see a career path for him once he’s gained the MBA?

He’s obviously got one eye on his long-term marketability as an employee, so I’d be keen to have a plan to retain and utilise him in a mutually beneficial way in at least the medium term.

Would it be possible to write a contract to cover this? Ie, ‘we pay for it but if you leave within x years of graduating, you pay y% of the fees (perhaps on a sliding scale (ie, 100% within 6 months, 75% within a year etc).

My cynical take..

If you want to become a bullshit based middle manager in a large corporation churning out drivel powerpoint slides on the lastest market research then an MBA is the fastest way to achieve that!

However, if you want to do something actually useful with your life then I don’t see the point.

They did used to be the fastest ticket to work for one of the big consultancies back in the 90s.

You could agree to meet his student loan repayments for as long as he’s an employee there? So then he’s sort of getting it for free.

got 3 chaps at work doing this – why i cant really fathom. 1 is a chartered engineer, knows his stuff, recently completed his level 7Diploma in management and is already on the operational board of the company with me. 2. Degree in something sciency again has done the same level 7 diploma – again sits on board. 3rd, middle management chap, has some degrees in something, but is trying to fly high – nice enough. In all 3 scenarios they will not add anything to the company, but they will to them personally if all you look at is what have you achieved academically.

My last sentence i’ll put into perspective. I’ve had an office go through half a dozen individuals in the last 12-18 months -all with min 2 x degrees. the jobs have been junior management and below – they’ve all failed to show what on earth went to uni did for them -to the point where i’ve told HR to stop asking for soddin degrees and look for GCSE leavers..

Why they do it is easy – for a lot of jobs in my sector as staff rather than contractor you apply via a standard form, and if your best degree starts with B rather than M or P you get filtered straight out.

they will not add anything to the company, but they will to them personally if all you look at is what have you achieved academically.

There might be a grain of truth to that, but ….

I fell for a previous managers bullshit when they offered on the job training instead of an MSc due to budget constraints. With the promise that it wouldn’t affect anything as I’d be in the same roles, getting the same in house training and access to the same libraries.

3 years on the industry goes tits up and “skills and experience” get’s you filtered straight out of the CV pool when applying for the equivalent role again requires an MSc.

If I was advising the employee in the OP I’d tell them to accept nothing less than the masters.

If I was advising the OP I’d tell them to look at it as a very cheap way of retaining one of their presumably higher flying and motivated employees for the 2-3 years it will take + whatever retention time you can negotiate into their contract afterward.

For what you get in terms of education, MBAs cost more than other Masters level qualifications. So if there is another Masters they might be interested in doing, it would almost certainly cost less.

If I were you I’d ask him where he’d like to study, what’s on the syllabus, and how he envisages applying what he learns in your company to add value.

In fact you could ask him to present a cost-benefit analysis of his proposal, it’ll be good practice if he does do the course 😀 .

I closely watched my wife do one, I thought I would do it after.

I thought in the end, what a pointless qualification it is, or maybe it was when you are 50 and you have been doing this for years anyway. She (I) learnt nothing, and the less time she spent doing each piece of work she got better marks.

Not for me

In our industry it is a prerequisite for some roles and grades/ranks, but we have our own university and process, it’s still costly and time consuming though

Is it beneficial, in terms of personal knowledge and understanding it will be for them, it will give them a better cv to earn and move on, company wise, it’ll give them the potential to role out some ideas that may work, it’ll also give you an employee you can sell easier to clients

Overall I find masters level stuff takes a lot of effort to get, he will have to study, travel, commit time to the uni, this will affect his work over the next 2-3 years as I’m guessing it’s part time?

It really depends on whether you as an employer have the scope and ‘headroom’ to fulfil the role expectations of an employee post-MBA. Many employees leave post-MBA (and professional development) because their employer simply expect them to go back to their old job without expanding the scope of their role. That said, MBAs are useless without the opportunity to apply the theory to real world ‘messy’ projects where you have half the budget and resources to deliver an unrealistic outcome.

I did one over 20 years ago – my employer paid the fees but most of the study was in my time apart from one afternoon a week. I was doing a global BD role and spent lots of time on planes and in hotels. They made me redundant shortly after I finished due to an acquisition and so never had to pay-back the fees. The next job got me a 50% pay rise and I wouldn’t have got it without the MBA or some form of post-grad qualification. Spent the next 18 years in a big corporate doing a range of jobs – but ultimately it was my knowledge and experience of that sector that kept me there, the MBA just got me in the door for the interview.

It really depends on whether you as an employer have the scope and ‘headroom’ to fulfil the role expectations of an employee post-MBA. Many employees leave post-MBA (and professional development) because their employer simply expect them to go back to their old job without expanding the scope of their role. That said, MBAs are useless without the opportunity to apply the theory to real world ‘messy’ projects where you have half the budget and resources to deliver an unrealistic outcome.

I was about to write this. Not all MBAs are equal, you need to consider how you as their employer is going to benefit from it. Too often folk do MBAs in organisations that are not mature enough to benefit from them. If your organisation already knows everything then there’s no point sponsoring an MBA.

Mine has opened doors for me and got me into the mindset of lifelong learning, which has in turn allowed me to get into better paid work.

I’d suggest agreeing to it, but then spending some time working out how you as an organisation can get the most out of it.

I did an MBA part-time while working. It was a lot of effort and I found it interesting and a change from my normal job. I can’t say that it paid either me or my employer.

Incidentally, a lot of the other students were NHS managers and they were absolutely bloody useless.

Comes down to two value propositions really:

Will having somebody with an MBA in his current (and future) positions be of benefit to the company? As mentioned above – I would certainly be asking them to present their business case for this – that’s really the minimum price of entry that somebody should expect when asking for something like this.

Is it worth the cash just to retain this person? I mean, everyone will/should leave at some point, but supporting them through their MBA (and having a reasonable clawback period afterwards) will probably result in them staying in role for longer, than if you tell them “no” (which might trigger an immediate resignation).

A couple of other things to consider:
I would say that the time to study/attend the course is more significant than the course fees. Make sure you factor that in to any negotiation, and the fact that cost isn’t able to be recovered if/when they leave. If I was in their position, I’d want to stump up the cash myself (to avoid any clawback) but get your agreement for me to do some study in work time – some MBAs have one day per month on campus, or a week’s residential course or something.

There are loads of accredited management/leadership/business qualifications available – and I’m willing to bet that there are probably a fair few that will fit the businesses needs (and theirs) better than an MBA….. but the MBA is something that people think will magically make them more employable/valuable. I would say that a sensible discussion with them about what they want to gain/achieve is probably going to point to a different qualification, and result in better outcomes all around.

Do a bit of research into Degree Apprenticeships, We have 4 employees doing MBA which are funded by Skills Development Scotland (via a company levy), I believe they are known as Degree Apprenticeships in England, and to be honest I’m not sure of the funding situation, but worth looking at.