A host of new MBA options

A host of new MBA options

B.C.’s universities are constantly updating their MBA offerings to reflect the evolving demands of the global business community.

After offering specialty MBAs for years, last September marked the inauguration of SFU’s basic MBA program. The program is packed into one calendar year, with a paid internship upon completion.

UBC is also catering to the business newbie with its Early Career Masters degree, a one-year program aimed at students with non-business undergraduate degrees. The first intake will be September 2008; applications close May 15.

UBC is also launching a new executive MBA program this year. The executive MBA in health care specifically targets management in B.C.’s health-care sector and is ­offered in partnership with a number of other institutions, including the Centre for Health Care Management, headed by Bob Smith, former CEO of the Fraser Health Authority.

A new dean of the Faculty of Manage­ment at Royal Roads University brings a wealth of international expertise, particularly in NAFTA. Pedro Márquez comes to Victoria from Mexico City, where he served as dean of the business school at Tecnológico de Monterrey.

In addition to bringing a global perspective, Márquez plans to strengthen the program’s focus on entrepreneurial skills. The upshot of a recent curriculum review at Royal Roads is that course content will no longer be broken into separate domains, such as marketing, finance and human resources, but will be integrated into a unified learning environment.

“It resembles real life,” Márquez explains. “When you run a business, very seldom do you have a problem that is defined only by marketing. It usually has a marketing, a finance and an HR angle.”
Malaspina University-College has shed its training wheels and now offers its own MBA degree.

Previously, it offered a joint degree through a partnership with the Univer­sity of Hertfordshire in England. While the shared degree is still an option, the Malaspina MBA is delivered entirely in-house. Malas­pina also introduced a second annual intake; students can now begin the program in either January or September.

At UVic, two new partnership agreements have led to two new degrees: MBA/MSc and MBA /MEng. In both cases, one semester at the partner institution at the end of the program completes the MBA and then one additional semester at the partner institution adds the second degree. The combined MSc involves a couple of semesters in France, while engineers simply traverse the UVic campus to spend a couple of

International consulting opportunities have also expanded at UVic. The MBA program’s required international consulting project can now be completed in Mumbai or Delhi, in addition to the previous options of Seoul or Shanghai.

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