The reputation of MBA as the leading international business qualification continues to grow. Since 1994 the number of MBA graduates worldwide has increased by over 25 percent a year. Faced with so much choice, individuals considering their professional development and employers recruiting senior executives want to have confidence in the quality of the MBA and need guidance on how to go about selecting the right business school.

Seeing the need for a forum to address this issue SiliconIndia organized ‘Utkarsh’ (boom), a platform to hear and interact with the leaders of Samsung, Symphony, Adithi, and Citrix on how Executive MBA will add value to one’s career. It was a platform for colleges to share and also to know what working professionals look forward through an Executive MBA and also for the professional managers and executives to find out what are the tangible benefits that they identify from their experience with Executive MBA graduates.
C Mahalingam, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, Symphony opined, “It (the Executive MBA degree) is not just a ladder to be a leader but to be a result oriented leader. I suggest all the middle managers to take a break and go for an Executive MBA. If you look at all the global CEOs, the successful ones do not have an MBA. It is a myth to believe that an Executive MBA can make you a CEO. You need to have much more than that. But an MBA can transform and add value to you.”

With the importance attached to the degree growing, so many institutes across the country have come forward to offer executive MBA programs. These programs have been highly successful in imparting leadership skills and highly qualified managerial capabilities in executives. “Five years from now people will not find job through newspaper advertisements. The organizations have a great role and they should have a brand name, otherwise people won’t hire and the candidates should be focused on what they want to do,” said Mohan Gopinath, Professor, HRM Alliance Business School.

The event also included sessions where industry experts, who pursued executive MBA and have successfully made a mark in their respective domains, spoke about the challenges of today’s business environment and the scope of executive MBA in such a scenario. A discussion about the standards that the industry is demanding from their managers when it comes to efficient management of resources also took place.

Munwari Padmanabhan, Head HR, Broadcom India said that a college degree is not an end in itself. It is but one milestone in a lifelong learning process. It does not guarantee success, but it provides a solid foundation on which we can build our future. Take Bill Gates, for example. In spite of the phenomenal success behind his Microsoft Corporation, he still admits that the partial education he got from Harvard is invaluable. He’s the most successful among Harvard’s drop-outs. However, what we have failed to see is that Gates has an unquenchable thirst for learning new things, trailblazing on new technologies, and outwitting his business competitors by getting ahead in acquiring or even inventing new knowledge when there is none.