How are the other alumni, who were not returning to a family business doing, from an employment perspective? Are they also unemployed?

I came to this site on behalf of my brother to research management courses, all be it from a different institution.

I just want to shed some lights on students who want to do MBA or MSc in Management in the UK

1. Look for quantitative skills:

Whithout being too philosophical about quantitative and qualitative, always remember that quantitative is a must. If you cannot give the figures nobody will listen to you. Once you have the figure you can baffle your way through it.

Go to a programme that teach you good quantitative programme, the least you can do is fancy Excel spreadsheet with nice charts, pivot tables, interactive interface and nice format. Let me say it again that is the MINIMUM

The stronger programme will cover things such as Mathlab or VBA but that number of schools teaching you that is less than 10 out of over 300 institutions in UK.

2. Look for statistics:

Again be very specific

Before the programme:
Who are the people getting in? how much work experience do they have? Average GPA? Where do they come from? I don?t want to be in the same class as 40% chinese and 40% indian ( nothing to do with discrimination, because chinese and indians also say the same) Who do they work for before the programme?

After the programme:
How much is the salary? How much change job functions, get promotion, move to a new country, move to a new industry or role? How many get industrial placement or internships? Where do they work? OK I know JPMorgan hired from this batch but this guy already have a job with JP? Does the school help him to fill the internship or he is the son of a Minister? How many people get jobs with big corporation? How many go to stack the shelves in Tesco and work in charity for CancerResearch in a role nothing related to their career

Finp

I can only feel sorry for yourself. The programme is very superficial. Exam is also equally useless because they cover very superficial understanding of the subject and not allowing you to do the real work.

If I am to design a programme for Warwick let s pick marketing management. You guys wonder how I can cover quantitative skills in a marketing class .I wont bullshit about many stupid ideas coming from academics whose job is to sit through the dy writing useless things to get published.

What I will let my student do is to give them a quantitative project like running a marketing campaign to get people into loyalty programme. This would require students to do quantitative modelling of pricing models, forecasting the demand, customers acquisition etc. Some excel modelling during seminars will adequately equip students for this project. Doing project of this type would also help them to apply theory into practice. This is the proper way to teach but Warwick and most others wont do it.

Now if you graduate from this marketing course and get into a marketing job you will be able to do a project straight away and have the nice figures and reports to show to your boss and clients. They will be happy because the bottom line is the NUMBER. They will pretend that they care about how do you come up with the figures, this is when you baffle your way through it by citing several ideas and statistics.

In an operations management course, I will cover topics of lean and six sigma. Will teach you all skills in diagramming, documenting process, calculating the waste in real figures. All these can be done with excel statistics formulaes, powerpoints and may be visio. You come out of the course and you can sit in a project straight away. You can draw diagrams and document process because that is what juniors do. Then you get to understand the soft-skills while sitting in meetings and learning from your boss. But Warwick wont do it, they will talk about a lot of ideas and let you read a lot of things without doing a single proper project.

you seem to consider MBA/MIM as subject of math just to do some quant works like excel and presentations. i think guys who are to join these MBAs in UK (thing top 5) knew about the basic quants from their work exp.

Sorry Finp, you still sound like 'sour grapes' to me and I guess that is what many others will think too. Did Warwick promise you a job at the end of the course? If so the solution is simples - take legal action against them. If not, you will be better off using your time exploring the employment market rather than making a fool of yourself in this way.

donho199 makes some interesing points about quant skills however it's worth remembering that most MBAs won't get into VBA or Mathlab. If you want to work in finance, or even in management consulting, I think those are really useful skills. However, I think most students will be fine with Excel, its Descriptive Statistics add-in, and something like CrystalBall or Solver.

I'd also look for the case-based class room approach. Business is about making decisions with other people so, while it;s true that knowing the numbers of often the key to a problem, so is learning to persuade - and the case approach does teach that if used well.

I must say, I think the overwhelming use of essays is a bit odd, and marks Warwick out as an academic school. At LBS I think much of the mark comes from groupwork - maybe even half.

Sorry Finp, you still sound like 'sour grapes' to me and I guess that is what many others will think too. Did Warwick promise you a job at the end of the course? If so the solution is simples - take legal action against them. If not, you will be better off using your time exploring the employment market rather than making a fool of yourself in this way.

Thank you for your post Duncan, I actually agree fully with your view but I still think that students must be able to do something practical and be able to show some results first before learning all managerial persuation and negotiation skills.

I myself don?t know how to teach/learn this properly. But let me elaborate a bit what I though the process could be.

Let?s look at a very interesting topic operations management if designed properly will teach students a lot about real management because it covers both quantitative and qualitative skills.

Let say Toyota recall their faulty cars and you are in charge of identifying the problems and rectifing it. Of course everything looks perfect from outside, all the SLA are met and all QA/QC are complete. So where is the problem

You would need quantitative or technical skills to do a lot of things with data but you also need a lot of qualitative skills such as: observation: a lot of fresh graduates wont have the attention or sharp eyes to closely look into the details. This is qualitative or management skill. Another skill is understand the politics when you come in and finding out who is responsible for a fault you gotta be really good at office politics, dealing with uncertainty, detecting lies and confusion. You also need to be very persuasive, banging the table and pointing the fingers.

However, I would imangine juniors will do things like doing nice presentation, tracking statistics, running data analysis. They will however must also particiapte in meetings and also observe the process but they wont have the same experience as a Blackbelt somebody who has wealth of experience in process changes.

You guys might say that writing down process and draw flow charts are simple but the problem is the expertise. Anyone can write a process but is it useful? Does people see the bottleneck? Does people see the key stages, the fine details they need from a step?
The same go for drawing flow chart, are they nice and tidy? Enough of decision points, showing a lot of insights?

And then when you come to do the project cash-flow anybody can throw figures together on a spreasheet but does anyone use the layer view sorry I forgot the func in excel but basically allowing your boss to click to expand or collapse details on the report. This way he can see the bottom line and then can drill further and further on details.

On the spreadsheet showing the many scenarios of business forecasting do you just simply calculate individual outcomes or have some interactive interface in excel where your boss can simply click on the dropdown list and then the figures appear for him already. Are your charts dead or interactive continously showing the data changes.
These are easy skills but do schools teach you that?

Now I don?t want to debate whether Warwick should teach all these skills or not and they might argue that clicking a few buttons on Excel does not worth the academic degree but I tell them that employers don?t care what you do they need students to possess those skills as quick as possible.

Instead I would imagine many lecturers simply talk about the global supply chain and the massive data warehouse or ERP system that helps to make operations smooth.

They may also talk about cultural differences between Chinese and American, that outsourcing leads to lifting millions of Indian out of poverty but would your boss want to know that or he may say how much money do I save and is the quality of the products is the same?

Yes, I agree with that, and I'd even put it this way: students need to 'hit the ground running' and courses need to resemble the work in some way. With the case approach it's pretty easy to develop analytical skills because you need to run the numbers to get the answers. During my MBA at LBS we really did this very often and we all became pretty proficient at Excel. I studied alongside a lot of exchange students from ESADE and IESE and, looking at them, I think the Spanish students *really* know how to do the numbers, and that gives them a huge edge. However, you need both the quant skills and the soft skills to work as a manager: that's why the group work helps (and, of course, it can be group work with Excel).

I guess the problem for this Warwick person is to answer this question: what has the Warwick MSc prepared me for? If it's writing essays, for example, then perhaps the person should be looking for work as an industry analyst rather than as a quant. And then they should also be thinking about what sort of MBA to save up for ;-)

Sorry Finp but it just looks to me like you are ranting. Business schools can teach you a lot however, judgement is something that you need to learn for yourself although it is someything employers value greatly. If you are demonstrating the same rather wobbly traits at interview or in applications as you are showing here, I can see why you are not having any success in the job market. If you do not get over yourself and move on, you are likely to do more damage to your career.

Sorry Finp but it just looks to me like you are ranting. Business schools can teach you a lot however, judgement is something that you need to learn for yourself although it is someything employers value greatly. If you are demonstrating the same rather wobbly traits at interview or in applications as you are showing here, I can see why you are not having any success in the job market. If you do not get over yourself and move on, you are likely to do more damage to your career.

I am sorry if you judge that I am disappointed or even sarcastic, you are wrong in all your assumptions and assertions. I am a recruiter with 30+ years experience and was hoping to get you out of your rut but it seems that you like it there.

and was hoping to get you out of your rut but it seems that you like it there.

I bet £10 that you are in some way related to WBS

Hello Finp
I am a current student at Warwick Business School MSc Management Program. Its been just over 2 months since I am here and I really dont think the school is that bad. I have been to some of the employer presentations and found quite a lot of people working in the biggest organizations in UK are from Warwick. One of the students from my batch has already been offered a job ( with a very good organization) and some others who have applied have got interview calls.
I am not speaking in favor of or against anyone but it just makes me curious that if the school is so bad as mentioned in the above comments, then why companies are inviting students for an interview or assessment centre? Why is it so popular among employers in the UK, if not any other country?

Well, I think the point this person is making is that it was bad at preparing him personally for work. I think you have to take things in their totality: Warwick comes 48th out of 65 top European business schools. That's great, to be in the top 50, but also there's room for improvement. What does Warwick need to do to catch up with Cass and Edinburgh, whose MSc graduates earn much more, and whose programmes are similar or better in terms of fees, value and aims achieved?

Donho suggests that quant skills are lacking and, indeed, when we look at graduates from Warwick's own MSc in finance we see that there the school is ranked 5th in Europe, with a salary around 40% higher than the MSc in management. That does suggest that more quant skills could be useful in improving student outcomes.

It's simply not the case that UK business don't recruit international students. In fact, the data show that some of the best schools in the world for the placement of international students are in the UK: Best schools for international students' placement http://www.find-mba.com/board/41143


However, that is about the best schools. The idea that a unranked, research-oriented school like Loughborough will provide a strong MBA for mid-career managers, with good career services, can be excluded from first principles. But that does not mean that all UK schools are bad. The best are excellent.