Around this time last year, Nathan Weathington was meeting with municipal heads of traffic engineering in China and South Korea to gather market information for Carmanah Technologies Corp., a Victoria-based company that makes solar-powered LED lighting products.
Mr. Weathington, now 33, didn't actually work for Carmanah, nor did he have any business interests in China and South Korea. Instead, his Asian odyssey came to him courtesy of the 12-day "international integrative management exercise" that is a compulsory part of the MBA program at the University of Victoria.
"Our whole MBA program is international," says Heather Ranson, marketing manager of graduate programs at UVic's business school. "This is something our dean is very passionate about — for every MBA student to be exposed to international culture and to have experience in a completely foreign business situation."
UVic's dean isn't the only one thinking along these lines. From Pepperdine University in California to the Helsinki School of Economics in Finland, business schools around the world are adding an "I" — for international — to their MBA programs.
Nathan Weathington turned his MBA from the University of Victoria into a position at UsedEverywhere.com, a company that provides online classified advertisements. (DEDDEDA STEMLER FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
In Canada, a growing number of schools list IMBAs on their course calendars. Bernie Wolf, director of the international MBA program at York University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto, says IMBAs are a logical response to the continuing shift toward a global economy.
"International MBA programs arose from a need for business people who were culturally sensitive, have spent time abroad and are interested in the international marketplace," Dr. Wolf says.
"Over time, the global marketplace has clearly become more important — we see vast amounts of foreign investment, trade has increased, and manufacturing has increasingly segmented so that you end up having something produced in a series of places."
The definition of an international MBA varies from one school to another. At the basic end of the spectrum, an IMBA can simply mean a program with courses that focus on such subjects as international business law and international human resources management.
At schools such as the University of Alberta, an MBA in International Business also offers students opportunities to sign up for an elective study tour to a foreign country, where they spend a week or two at a local company, and to swap one term of study in Edmonton for a term with partner universities in France or Mexico.
The University of Victoria offers similar study exchanges with 18 partner universities abroad. It also requires all MBA students to do as Mr. Weathington did — travel either to Asia or South America and spend 12 days as a consultant working on a project for a company.
Ms. Ranson at UVic points to a growing trend in international MBAs: dual degrees granted by a Canadian university and a partner school in another country.
"How this would typically work at the University of Victoria is that students will take their first-year MBA with us and then go on an exchange — for example, to Toulouse University in France — where they can stay for an extra semester to earn an additional degree," she explains.
"Having these dual degrees gives them even more credibility when they're looking for work abroad or here in Canada."
Most IMBA programs require students to have an undergraduate degree plus at least two years' work experience.
At Schulich, IMBA students must also be able to speak, with some proficiency, a language used in one of the geographic regions being studied in the program.
This was no problem for Seumas Graham, who had learned to speak and write Mandarin when he lived in Taiwan in the late 1990s. Mr. Graham says he was already quite proficient in his spoken Mandarin but was writing it using traditional Chinese characters.
"During the [Schulich] IMBA, I learned to make the transition to simplified characters, which is what they use for business in China," says Mr. Graham, 35. "That was a great help."
Students certainly get a lot of chances to practise their second language; as part of its IMBA program, Schulich places students in semester-long working internships with firms in Europe, Latin America, and south or east Asia.
Where students go depends on which region they've chosen to study. These days, says Dr. Wolf, Europe and China are particularly popular among IMBA students. "We're also seeing an increasing interest in India," he adds.
In some MBA programs, students don't need to limit their study tour to one country or region. At the University of Victoria, for example, students in the final semester of the MBA program can sign up for a global MBA that lets them spend eight weeks at a time in three different schools — UVic, the National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan, and Johannes Kepler University in Austria.
"This is a very popular program — the competition to get in is quite intense," says Ms. Ranson.
The strong demand for global business education is also being felt in executive MBA programs. At the University of Toronto's Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, for instance, the global EMBA has taken more than 100 students in the past four years on a world tour that includes three-week stops in China, Switzerland, Hungary, Brazil, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates.
At each stop, students do a combination of classroom work, company visits and consulting projects.
"For someone who is looking to work abroad, this is a good way to test the waters," says Danny Cushing, director of the global EMBA program at Rotman.
So how much does it cost to get an international or global MBA these days?
The answer depends on the school. For example, the Rotman global EMBA costs $80,000 in course fees, plus about $15,000 to $20,000 for travel and accommodation costs. At Schulich, IMBA program fees range from about $42,000 to $45,000.
The return on investment from international and global MBAs, while hard to measure, can be quite significant, says Dr. Wolf. "People end up getting good, well-paying jobs," he says. "They also walk away with an incredible network of international contacts, from fellow students in the program to all the business people they met overseas."
Mr. Weathington and Mr. Graham agree. Mr. Weathington is now in charge of business development for UsedEverywhere.com, a rapidly growing Victoria company that provides online classified advertisements. Although the company's business interests are primarily in Canada, Mr. Weathington says having an MBA with an international twist helped him get the job.
Similarly, Mr. Graham attributes much of his success to his IMBA. A decade ago, with a degree in English literature, he was teaching English in Taiwan and hating it. Today, Mr. Graham runs the Shanghai operations of the Economist Intelligence Unit, a global company that provides country, industry and management analysis.
"I've doubled my salary from 2002, which was when I was working as a magazine editor before I quit and enrolled into Schulich," Mr. Graham says. "If I didn't have my IMBA, I don't think I would have had this opportunity at all."
Special to The Globe and Mail
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