“Just in Time” Learning: An agile approach to an MBA
I was enrolled in a full-time MBA program in the fall of 2020 before withdrawing. Then earlier this year, I experienced a renaissance in my love for learning and began to voraciously read again. After finding and reading Laurie Pickard’s book Don’t Pay for your MBA, I was introduced to her concept of an “alternative MBA.” In it, she describes how to design your own MBA curriculum by taking courses online via free or low-cost MOOCs.
Having experienced both a traditional MBA and now a couple months of an alternative MBA, I feel I have a somewhat unique perspective to judge the tradeoffs between them.
Benefits of traditional MBAs :
- Educational — Learn modern business practices with the unique pedagogy of in-class, real time learning with peers (socratic learning, group projects, presentations, etc.). This has not yet been replicated online successfully (in my opinion).
- Social — Gain a professional network from the alumni and university community.
- Professional — Improve qualifications with an advanced degree.
Costs of a traditional MBA:
- Financial — Expenditures and/or debt accumulation for tuition and living expenses. For those who don’t work while enrolled, the opportunity cost of lost wages. In total, this could approach $300,000–400,000. For me, I was in a 1 year program so the financial costs were halved, but I still estimated them to total $160,000.
- Work experience — Aside from wages, a loss of 2 years of work experience. (Again, for me this would have only been 1 year.)
- Educational — The converse of an MBA’s benefits is you must meet all basic requirements, regardless of their relevance or applicability to your immediate or long-term career goals. As Pickard writes much more eloquently:
If you pursued an MBA the regular way, you’d end up taking a lot of required courses that you may or may not be able to use right away. Years later, would you remember what you studied in Supply Chain Management 101? Worse yet, what if you never ended up needing that information at all? Still, business students in traditional programs must invest valuable time and money to complete course requirements that may or may not fit their particular situations. (Pickard, Laurie. Don’t Pay for Your MBA.)
I want to make a point here that these tradeoffs are not conclusive. I am not suggesting we should end traditional MBAs. No one knows exactly what skills and experiences they will need in the future. Each person weighs the benefits and costs differently. Plus, having the advice of MBA professors, alumni, and staff in designing what they think will be the optimal curriculum is very valuable. And while you may be planning on a career where Supply Chain Management 101 seems useless, innovation is often found at the intersection of two fields that have not been connected before.
I don’t believe that an alternative MBA is better than a traditional MBA. I don’t think MOOCs have found a way yet to replicate the benefits of a traditional MBA’s pedagogy or alumni network. An alternative MBA will never be the same thing as having attended an accredited university’s MBA program.
But different does not mean worse. An alternative MBA simply optimizes for different things.
What are the fundamental distinctions?
- I can take any class I want, whenever I want.
- I can take as few or as many classes at any time depending on my availability.
- I can save a considerable amount of money.
- I can apply an agile approach using “just in time” learning:
Traditional business school [are] a “just in case” education, where students learn most topics “just in case” they might come in handy later. But “just in case” doesn’t square with the world of work that we now inhabit. Increasingly, people need skills that can be acquired and refreshed “just in time.” New educational tools like MOOCs can not only help you acquire specific skills just when you need them, they can refresh a skill that has faded over time. (Pickard, Laurie. Don’t Pay for Your MBA .)
Since I only have my best guess as to what my optimal course curriculum is, I will develop hypotheses that I can test before committing to a course. While I have a full core curriculum with possible electives documented, I won’t finalize classes until necessary.
By using this approach, I will have the best chance of prioritizing the highest valuable material and postponing the least valuable material.
To see this in action, you can read my post on how I picked my first week of classes.
