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Further investigation of the thoughts and attitudes contributing to the voluntary pursuit of an MBA degree and career change is necessary to better understand career motivations and to satisfy career goals. This two-part article attempts to achieve this objective.

Factors contributing to the cognitive decision to enrol in an MBA program and the subsequent impact of self-discovery gained on program entry on career strategy were explored using a 32-question survey based on empirical research findings.

Part-time and full-time MBA students exhibited differences in decision criteria applied for MBA program entry. Following program enrolment, opportunities for career growth led to upward goal revision and increasingly focused goals.

Participation was potentially limited by survey distribution during a demanding academic period where many project reports and group presentations were due. A single MBA program in the downtown Montreal area may not be representative of all programs in the population.

Anchoring individual career identity and social identity has become increasingly complex as employers in many industries undergo continuous transformational change.

Integration within the work environment of identified career roles requires additional attention to validate an individual's strategic career efforts.

Surveying MBA candidates about career decisions and goal-revision allows for a valuable “snapshot” of career evolution over time. By promoting increased self-awareness, applied knowledge gained through MBA program activities acts as a catalyst for self-efficacy beliefs which results in upward distal goal-revision or increased goal focus.

An old saying –“Jack of all trades, master of none”– deliberately asserts that the purpose of a master’s degree program is to generate high level job skills in order to improve a nation's economy, while a bachelor degree produces economically productive graduates. Employment of such graduates is fundamentally important for personal and economic development. There is a link between a bachelor’s and master's degree and how these qualifications are linked to the job market. Both horizontal and vertical mismatches are developed which is the central focus of this research.

Given the differentiated nature of research questions, multiple techniques are used to collect the data. However, this research bears the norms of the qualitative method. Both secondary and primary data are used, and meanwhile secondary data are collected by the banks, Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS), University Grants Commission (UGC) and by the institutions sampled. Primary data are gathered from interviews with key people. Data were collected from three institutions of higher education and from six commercial banks and from the Central Bank. The academic results of 21,325 MBA graduates and education backgrounds of 750 executives working in banks served as the basis for establishing our arguments.

This study discovers that MBA graduates who have studied science subjects achieved much better grades in the MBA compared to their counterparts who studied business from secondary provision to first degree. The market-driven MBA programme has become a “business product”. The major revenue of higher education institutions comes from enrolment in MBA courses. For this reason, a science-friendly MBA program is developed to generate more business. If this continues, the philosophy of the master's program would either be lost or will have to be redefined in the 21st century.

While a few studies have investigated the area of HE in Bangladesh, none covers the impact of MBA degrees on the job market and its contribution to enhancing job skills.

Participants will learn to analyze the basis of consumer segmentation in management education. It will specifically highlight the importance of positioning in influencing the marketing strategy of a firm and discuss the importance of a differentiated-low cost strategy to gain competitive advantage. The case will familiarize students with the business environment of rural India, and the applicability of the 4A’s and the 5D’s framework. Finally, the case will help participants understand the difference between a rural market and a Bottom-of-Pyramid (BoP) market.

A rural MBA institute for BoP students is grappling with the problem of low admissions, leading to an existential crisis. Two divergent options are presented to the protagonist. The first is to close down the B-school and use the infrastructure and facilities for a well-funded government skill development program which is vocational and intended for creating blue-collar workers. The second is to find ways to bolster the B-school to ensure that it gets adequate student enrollment, thereby leading to profitability.

This case is suitable for an undergraduate or MBA course in marketing management, rural marketing in India, South-Asian marketing or strategic marketing.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or e-mail support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. There is an accompanying spreadsheet with the case for studying the market. It contains relevant market data that would support analysis of the case. Comments are added for easy understanding. Instructors can access the separate spreadsheet that works out the break-even calculations for the fee structure of the institute. Instructions on calculations as well as comments are added for easy understanding.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the key predictors of Master of Business Administration (MBA) students' performance, considering the interaction between personality type, learning approaches and educational achievement. A structural equation model is formulated to check out the relationship perfection between the construct variables.

The study subjects were 208 MBA students at Zhejiang University. A questionnaire encompassing three sections was presented to the respondents. The first section is the revised two‐factor version of the study process questionnaire (R‐SPQ‐2F) developed by Biggs et al. The second section consists of 20 items developed based on a review of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) Five‐Factor Personality Inventory (Buchanan, 2001). The third section is about the respondents' background and personal information such as age, gender and their performance represented by their scores in the National Admission Examination System and their major course grade achieved during the first term of their academic year. A structural equation model was designed to examine the relationship between the study variables. Then covariance structural analyses of collected data were conducted for testing the model.

The main findings are significant correlations between the three personality traits, namely, extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience with the deep approach (DA) to learning predicting high MBA students' performance.

Personality type and students' approaches to learning constitute determinant factors impacting upon the education of management graduate students. Thus, institutions providing MBA programs must allocate more interest to examine their students' characteristics, in correlation with their performance rating. In this regard, the present study is designed to provide business education stakeholders with a modest model to depict the key predictors of MBA students' performance, particularly, part‐time MBA program whose participants are, in most cases, fully employed students, struggling to cope with their professional, educational and social duties.

This study empirically investigates the relationship between personality type and students' approaches to learning to find out their influence on MBA students' performance. The model results evidently demonstrate, on the one hand a significant correlation between these factors, and on the other hand their influence on the participants' performance reflecting high rating in pertinence with personality traits of extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience and the DA to learning.

Further investigation of the thoughts and attitudes contributing to the voluntary pursuit of an MBA degree and career change is necessary to better understand career motivations and to satisfy career goals. The purpose of this two-part paper is to achieve this objective.

Factors contributing to the cognitive decision to enroll in an MBA program and the subsequent impact of self-discovery gained upon program entry on career strategy were explored using a 32-question survey based on empirical research findings.

Part-time and full-time MBA students exhibited differences in decision criteria applied for MBA program entry. Following program enrollment, opportunities for career growth led to upward goal revision and increasingly focussed goals.

Participation was potentially limited by survey distribution during a demanding academic period where many project reports and group presentations were due. A single MBA program in the downtown Montreal area may not be representative all programs in the population.

Anchoring individual career identity and social identity has become increasingly complex as employers in many industries undergo continuous transformational change.

Integration within the work environment of identified career roles requires additional attention to validate an individual's strategic career efforts.

Surveying MBA candidates about career decisions and goal-revision allows for a valuable “snapshot” of career evolution over time. By promoting increased self-awareness, applied knowledge gained through MBA program activities acts as a catalyst for self-efficacy beliefs which results in upward distal goal-revision or increased goal focus.

In this article we present the results of a survey of marketing departments in Australasia. The department head completed the questionnaire, which covered the areas of class sizes, course taught, staff research interests and research productivity. We find that university marketing departments have experienced fast growth in student enrolments in the past year, and they expect overall enrolments to grow by about 15 percent over the next five years. Research interests among staff span a broad range of topics, and research productivity appears to compare favourably with the rates seen in similar disciplines in US universities.

Examines the changes which appear likely in MBA programmes in the next decade. Sets out a strategy to deploy an MBA as a global service business. Examines the imperatives towards a competence‐based, quality and personal development‐oriented MBA concerned more about learning process than curriculum and content. Looks at the development of one MBA programme as an example of a third‐generation MBA.

The paper seeks to examine major challenges facing MBA programs and to argue that they will have to reconsider their value proposition. It aims to explore effective curricular and programmatic responses as opportunities for MBA programs to innovate. The paper also aims to call for collective action across the business school field to effectively address these challenges.

The research is grounded in empirical methods including semi‐structured interviews, data on curricula, courses, applications, enrollments, tuition and fees, and faculty hiring, and case studies of particular institutions.

Business schools need to reassess the facts, frameworks, and theories that they teach, while also rebalancing their curricula to focus more on developing skills, capabilities, and techniques as well as cultivating values, attitudes, and beliefs.

The paper draws on original sources of qualitative and quantitative data to present a detailed picture of the current state of MBA education. It identifies eight unmet needs based on interviews with deans and executives, and proposes curricula innovations that address these needs.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the knowledge gap in designing MBA strategy between China and the West by examining the content, context and process of MBA delivery. This paper challenges the assumptions and pedagogical approach underpinning the current design and delivery of MBA programmes that were originally moulded with Western management history and development in the era of globalization. There is consensus that MBA was used to train business managers; however, nowadays, people are inclined to state that MBA is used to develop global business leaders or full-fledged global competitors. How can we develop global business leaders without a global vision when designing MBA strategy?

Based on extensive literature review and critical analyses through the strategic management approach, this paper examines the status quo of current MBA programmes in the West and in China. This paper presents a conceptual framework that draws on the current MBA literature and on-going debates around management education and development in the West and in China.

The designing strategy of MBA has been originally strongly influenced by Western ideology and ethos. Therefore, the difficulties of management knowledge transfer are often explained through culture acclimatization and emphasize has been on cultural divergence rather than convergence. With synthesis between Western and Eastern management identified, we argue that the appropriateness and effectiveness of the traditional philosophy of MBA designing strategy based on Western management history has been challenged in the 21st century. The perception has fuelled criticism of business schools in the post-recession. They have come under fire for allegedly failing in their obligations to educate socially responsible business leaders (Barker, 2010). This leads to rethinking of the philosophy and vision underpinning the MBA designing strategy. A new philosophical approach – integration of Western management with Eastern philosophy has been under scrutiny, which is necessary in business education to enable future business leaders to become full-fledged competitors in the global market.

The output of this discussion helps to establish a conceptual framework which will provide strategic insight in enabling business/management school and MBA providers to address the current deficiency in MBA teaching and learning strategy and develop more appropriate arrangement when considering the design and development of a successful MBA programme in the 21st century.