Hi there,

With years of work experience (IT) in Asia, I am now looking at an UK based 1 yr full time MBA course. By achieving this business education background, I hope to better extend my career as business connection between UK (EU) and Asia, preferrably myself based in UK.

I have limited clues to filter out a shortlist of the business school, except the ranking. A few of questions hopefully somehone can help with.
1. Aiming at the program of 2012, I should be able to get a IELTS score of 6.5 in time, but may fail GMAT in such short period of time. Can I just exclude those requiring GMAT, and focus only on the ones without GMAT requirement?Given it makes sense, is such a school list available somewhere?

2. How should I make use of the biz school rankings to make the list shorter? Assume high ranking schools set higher entry requirements in English/transcript/management experience/tuition, for which I self-evaluated Average. So, is it wise in my case to apply for the schools with UK Biz ranking of 20-50, to increase the possiblity getting the offer?

3. Having said that, is there other filter criteria to be considered, as I still have to single out 3 or so out of dozens? For example, would location of UK/proportion of Int' students/faculties, etc be issues to take into account?

4. In general, do the UK employers attach importance to School Ranking in recruitment practice? In Asia, they do.

5. The average age for MBA students is 29 or younger. Being 35 in the year of 2012, very likely I will look out of place in the course. Or some schools have older average age than others?
A friend in this board recommended EMBA to better fit my age (thanks btw), I didn't think of that before, but would assume EMBA requires even higher entry requirements, longer study term (1.5-2 yrs), thus higher overall cost(both finance and time) to afford. How would you see age of 35 for a MBA course?

Thanks ahead for any input!

1. No, take your GMAT. The outcomes are very different between the MBAs which require tests (the GMAT, GRE or Tage-Mage) and those which are not.
2. If you take the GMAT when it will be much easier to see which schools to apply to: those with an average GMAT closest to yours.
3. Look for the highest-ranked school you can get into.
4. Yes, you can see from the big differences in average salary that employers treat ranked schools much better.
5. Yes, some schools have higher average ages, but that's not a big problem in Europe where students are older than in the USA anyway. An EMBA would be a part-time programme so you'd almost certainly need a job in Europe before starting one. I suggest you focus on full-time programmes unless you have a job in Europe.

3. Look for the highest-ranked school you can get into.

That is true. But as a rule of thumb it's a useful guide.

Hi I would Suggest that you must take GMAT and see how you have scored, In case you score well based on your profile you may get some top ranking universities .. i.e. Warwick , cranfield, LBS etc, however if you are unable to crack GMAT then you will sill have options of getting into FT ranked B-School. appropriate time for GMAT would be latest by Nov11, if you are targeting for Sept 12.

if you have options outside the UK - there are some schools that have their own test as an option and GMAT is not mandatory. to name a few....

IE - Spain
CBS - denmark