This article will try to address one of the most common conundrum in the minds of working professionals – whether one should pursue a two-year full-time MBA or a one-year executive MBA. As a person crosses the 36 months mark in terms of work experience, this doubt is bound to them, but not anymore. This article will guide you regarding the pros and cons of each of these programs and help you in making an informed decision.
To begin with, the positioning of these two programs varies greatly. While the one year program is a very specialised one, the two-year program offers more flexibility with respect to your career choices. Having spent 3 years or more at a job, one has a fair idea of their career aspirations and accordingly, they decide to get an MBA to help them in the larger scheme of things.
If one decides to specialise in the current stream of work, the one year specialised MBA would be a good choice but if one wants to explore other areas of management as well, then they may opt for the two year program wherein they will be taught all subjects in the first year and they will have a choice to make an informed decision regarding specialisations after having studied subjects from all domains, and also having tried out some functions during the summer internship.
The other very important thing to be kept in mind is the rigour. The one year program is basically a compressed program so it is generally a lot more rigorous than the two-year program wherein the workload is by and large evenly spread out across the two years and it is generally less than the one year program.
Unlike the undergraduate program, MBA is more of a finishing degree and it involves a lot more hard work than the undergraduate studies. Make sure you be prepared about the sort of rigour you would be expected to handle before getting into the MBA program.
The next important point to be considered while making this decision is the legacy associated with these programs, speaking strictly in the Indian context, the one year programs at all the premier institutes are fairly new as compared to the two-year programs which are the flagship programs. Therefore, it does not have a very strong alumni base in the industry yet.
Hence, these programs are not able to attract the top recruiters in the consulting or the investment banking domains. Most roles which are offered in the one year MBA programs are in the sales and IT services domain. If one is comfortable with these domains, then he/she may opt for the one-year executive MBA otherwise the regular two-year MBA would be a preferred choice.
Also, if we talk about the compensation which these recruiters offer during campus selections, generally speaking, the two-year regular MBA programs attract higher compensation than the one year program. You may at times see the reverse being true as well but then those would be outliers.
By and large, an average candidate in the two-year program has access to more career choices and more opportunities than a one year executive MBA candidate. The very fact about the flexibility that we started with also explains this fact quite well. Just to take an example, there are very limited jobs in the operations sector for the MBA graduates because, in India, most of the operations role in managerial positions are filled by the people who joined in as engineers and moved up the ranks by promotions.
In conclusion, we may say that the one year MBA is good if one wants to advance his/her career in a particular domain in management. It definitely adds a lot of value to one’s profile but considering the career opportunities available to the candidates who pursue this program, one may want to opt for the one year executive MBA program if it is a company-sponsored one where one need not bother about campus placements and one can devote all his/her time and energy in learning what he/she is supposed to as part of the program without having to bother about anything else.
However, if one is looking for a change in his/her career and wants to leverage the b-school’s brand name to bag a high paying job, the two-year regular program would be a better choice!
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