With tuition costs for MBA programs in the tens of thousands, if not reaching ten 10,000’s – (trick question), wouldn’t it be great if someone else paid for your MBA? If you don’t have a sugar daddy or mamma, maybe your employer has a tuition reimbursement program. If your employer doesn’t have a tuition reimbursement program, is hope lost? Not necessarily. I’ve been working on an upcoming MBA Podcaster show titled “Getting Your Employer to Fund Your MBA.” In the podcast, we’ll explore a variety of situations including people who work for companies that have existing programs for funding MBA’s and those whose companies don’t. Some of the questions we’ll address:
Why would a company fund your MBA and how can you make it happen?
Does it make a difference if you work at a small company or a large company?
Do economic hard times mean that continued education benefits are going by the wayside?
There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so what will having your employer pay for your MBA cost you – if it’s not money?
I’ll be asking these questions and more of my guests and keeping you posted along the way with blog updates.
If your company doesn’t have an institutionalized program, what’s the best way to go about convincing your boss that the company should pay for your MBA. I spoke with Nicole, a financial services executive who went to a top 10 school, for my last blog post and she had more insight to add for this posting. (That’s not her real name, but she asked to remain anonymous because she works for a large company that doesn’t have an institutionalized program that funds MBA students.)
Nicole says that the first thing you should do is pretty obvious – do really good work. She continues…
“The second thing is to provide the structure for them, let them know what it would look like, frame it for them in the context of what competing institutions, or even in terms of what alternative types of organizations, do. In my case, they had no idea how this stuff works, or that it even existed. It’s kind of amazing for a company that big to not know about this stuff, but it’s not well known. And the third piece [of advice] is being really clear on what you would want to do when you came back and the value you would add after that…. [Be] able to say here’s why I’m going, here’s what I’m going to learn, and here’s how I will be more valuable and this is specifically the type of role or the track I want to be on afterwards, so that they understand, [that] this makes sense to invest in and they’ll be someone I can plug into a particular role or path when they come back.”
Yvon Le Renard is in the part-time executive MBA program at Kellogg / Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He convinced his company Alcatel to pay for his MBA with very specific and solid arguments for his boss about how an MBA will broaden what Le Renard can do for the company.
“The industry is changing drastically. The telecomm industry used to be run by North American and European companies. This is no longer true, so there will be a lot of Chinese competition, here in these regions [Asia]. The second reason is that most of the research and development used to be done in North America and Europe internally, which is no longer true. We’re doing a lot of R&D in these regions, we’re doing a lot of external innovations and R&D as well. And this is an area that I really wanted to understand well. How you can grow externally by partnerships, acquisitions and not only internally and how you can drive and change your company from European centric to Asian centric, where the growth is going to be in the next five years.”
Learn more of what Nicole, Yvon and the other guests have to say about company-financed MBAs in our upcoming show that will be in a couple of weeks. Other guests on the show include:
- Lynda Boman, principal, Boman Accounting Group, who will address what you need to know for your tax return if your company pays for your MBA;
- John Gianvittorio, manager at Raytheon and student UCLA Anderson School, who says that the economy hasn’t affected Raytheon’s decision to fund MBA’s;
- Jay, small tech business owner, who will talk about what it would take for him to sponsor an employee;
- Karla Krause, student, MIT Leaders for Global Operations program, who will talk about Dell’s fellowship program;
- Jennifer Powers, Manager of Marketing and Business Development for the City of Brampton, in Ontario, Canada, who will discuss why she decided to fund her MBA herself;
- Nicole, a financial services executive and student at a top 10 school, who will lay out the best way to have your company fund your MBA; and
- YoichiN, a financial services manager and MBA student, who will discuss what he owes his company in return for tuition reimbursement.
Read the full article: Getting Your Employer to Fund Your MBA: Making The Argument