At long last I have reached a conclusion regarding choice of MBA and will start the Manchester Global MBA in July.

There are a number of reasons for my choice:

a) Reputation and brand recognition
A brand with good recognition in UK but also further afield. Ranking 29th worldwide in the full-time ranking.

b) Flexibility
2.5-5 year duration with hiatus or more or less modules. Obviously it disrupts a cohort but it is important for me that the flexible options exists without major hassle.

c) The International Centres (owned by MBS, and the MBS academics travel to teach there) offer alternative venues & therefore dates for Module Workshops as well as a wider range of experiences. Many other MBA programmes are far more inflexible both in schedule of modules and the extent of the overseas elements.

As someone that is moving continent shortly this flexibility is important as travelling to Manchester for each of the modules will not be practical. This is a key reason why Manchester made more sense than other such courses like Warwick or even Oxford.

d) Attendance but not too much
It is important to network with other students and this is achieved through 3-day attendance for each module. Usually two modules can be taken consecutively to reduce travelling. This means six weeks approx of attendance. This is significantly less than the 14 or even 17 week-long modules of other courses. This level of attendance,coupled with their inflexibility, ruled out some EMBA offerings for me.

e) Overall value proposition
Great value at about 26kGBP and a good fit for my needs. The marginal cost of climbing up the rankings further is significant.

f) teamwork and collaborative focus, interesting and obviously of benefit though lower in my priorities.

g) Strong core subjects but limited electives
I've seen some of the notes and they seem pretty good, especially the Corporate Finance and Managerial Economics. The electives seem more limited.

The compromises I have had to make for Manchester relate to the nature of the cohort - likely to be younger and less experienced than a full EMBA; and the impact of moving base centre in the future. This means not being able to benefit from the same cohort for half of the course.

Other EMBAs that I considered required attendance of 8 weeks a year over fixed duration with no or minimal flexibility. This is to ensure the cohort take the journey together but is a commitment I could not make at this time.

So I am very happy to be starting the Manchester Global MBA a quality established part-time flexible course. I am sure will be great fun.

BigD

At long last I have reached a conclusion regarding choice of MBA and will start the Manchester Global MBA in July.

I would be interested in discussing the experiences of any current students or alumni.

BigD

I do consider Warwick a top university and I see its business school as the direct competition of MBS

I'm gonna post more chronological info in the next weeks just to share my experience up to now, with pros and cons, of course.

I've also been offered a place on the MBS Global MBA, starting in July (Finance Accelerated route), however I'm tormenting myself over whether the investment will be worthwhile in the end.

I'm a CIMA qualified accountant working in a business planning role for a large media business, so I'm NOT a technical accountant. I'm not looking to shift my career horizontally, but am keen to gain vertical acceleration, probably into a commercial FD type of role. My boss, the CFO, begain a distance MBA at Warwick around 15 years ago, but stopped when he had his first kid. Nonetheless he valued his experience highly, crediting it for transforming his career, and wishes he'd been able to complete it.

At the moment I'm not entirely clear on what I hope to get out of the experience - I'm finding it difficult to commit to making the decision given the financial and lifestyle sacrifices it will inevitably result in.

BigD - what are your objectives?

Are there any other alumni on here that can share their objectives and whether they were met by the course?

My objectives are to obtain knowledge of financial and management accounting and managerial economics, with additional interest in marketing to support cross-functional and general management in engineering firms.

MBAs are broad-based and seem to have a cachet beyond a specialist MSc. For example I considered a study of Corporate Finance at ICMA in Reading but not only did it seem a bit too narrow, I realised there are lots of marginal skills that a good MBA can develop. More importantly it can provide a framework to integrate all the concepts and learning from the functional areas into an integrated view of how the firm operated in its environment...

As a more mature (!) student, the knowledge, networking and international experience is more important than the qualification to me: though an MBA from a well-ranked school can't be bad can it :-)

BigD