Hi All,

Looking for some guidance on MBA courses please. I'm 37 with a background in operations, currently at senior management level.

I'm keen to do an MBA, my current employer has agreed to sponsor £20k towards the tuition fees. My initial though was to sign up with the Open University. However it doesn't seem that there would be much value in that path.

I've spoken to both Cass and WBS about their distance learning MBAs with a couple of weeks on campus.

Cass £30k vs WBS £37k. I'm going to put in the difference in fees. Which would you recommend? I have a solid understanding for operations and would like to improve my finance knowledge. The good thing about Cass Global MBA is that upon completing the course they allow you to do the other electives free of charge (one per year) until electives run out. They also have a good mix of finance.

1. Which would you recommend? Will the extra £7k for WBS be worth it?
2. How important and accessible are the alumni network when doing a distance course?
3. What are the future employability prospects like with the different school names on a CV. Looking at linkedin there's quite a broad spectrum of alumni for WBS. Some in jobs that you wouldn't associate with an MBA.

I feel that consultancy and finance are my interests at the moment.

Advice and thoughts on the above much appreciated

Cliche: it depends on your goals. If you want to improve your finance knowledge, then an MSc in finance, or maybe the Harvard ALM in finance, will be better and cost less. If you want an MBA with a lot of finance depth, then the Illinois iMBA seems to have 60% more content than most UK MBAs. 

Although I really like the iMBA program, I'm not sure it would be the best fit if you're looking for a UK network. In general you should have decent access to alumni doing either of these programs. That shouldn't be an issue. The issue would be which has a better alumni 'footprint' in your industry. That's something you should be able to figure out by looking at LinkedIn or asking around at industry events. On LinkedIn, yes the data will be undoubtedly noisy but using your best judgment you should be able to make some broad generalizations. 

The Warwick program is ranked at the top of the FT Online MBA Ranking, with very good salary statistics, so that's the one I would tend to recommend and for most students would be worth the extra investment.