The Thunderbird School of Global Management will be planting its flag in Kazakhstan this fall, hoping to tap a growing market of oil and gas executives in need of more sophisticated business training. A new satellite office, opening this Friday, is part of Thunderbird Worldwide, a new for-profit executive training division of the Glendale, Arizona-based business school. The Kazakhstan office is considered a pilot project and is part of the school’s new strategy to expand the school’s impact in emerging markets, said Karl Theisen, Thunderbird’s director of global expansion.
With this venture, the school hopes to build upon its familiarity with the region and carve out a niche for itself in a booming market, Theisen said. For the last 15 years, the school has been running an executive education training center in Russia, Thunderbird Russia, where it provides a mix of custom and open-enrollment classes that teach business skills, management and leadership. Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic, is still primarily a Russian-speaking country, and the school will be able to use much of the same content and even some of the same instructors in this new outpost, said Theisen. The school expects to enroll between 2,500 and 3,000 students annually within the next one to two years, and almost all of the classes will feature face-to-face instruction. If this pilot goes well, the school hopes to set up similar training centers in the Middle East and South Asia in the coming years, the school said.
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