To do or not to do an MBA?  An entrepreneur’s opinion.

Over time, MBA training, constantly adapted, became synonymous with success in the business world and arrived in Europe at the end of the 50s. It is one of the few diplomas whose name and content are known in every country in the world. This is all the more remarkable as it is essentially a continuing education diploma, since it requires participants to have professional experience prior to admission.

An MBA is almost always the quickest way to acquire the knowledge and skills you need for a comprehensive understanding of business management. It’s the perfect way to advance your career or prepare for a possible future entrepreneurial activity. Our MBA programs, which aim to offer a holistic approach to management training, obviously evolve in line with the changes affecting the practice of business management. At Business School Lausanne, for example, we revise our programs every year. This may be minor or major, and lead to the introduction of new subjects and disciplines (hard skills). Our MBA, for example, includes courses on sustainable development, digitalization, data analysis and artificial intelligence. In terms of personal development, given the maturity and diversity of our students, the MBA is also a great program for acquiring leadership skills and personal growth (soft skills).

Firstly, junior professionals who wish or are offered the opportunity to take on managerial responsibilities. The MBA enables engineers, for example, to translate their mastery of numbers into financial management, and to learn about other areas of business management that they have not had the opportunity to study or practice. Then there are the managers already in place who want to move on to greater responsibilities. At Business School Lausanne, we have a program for this population of accomplished professionals, the Executive MBA, which enables them, while keeping a job, to exchange ideas with their peers, encouraging the sharing of experience and critical debate. Finally, there are candidates with a more entrepreneurial profile, who come with a specific development project for the company employing them (intrapreneurship) or with a business creation project or idea in mind, and who wish to reduce the risk of a future entrepreneurial experience by building on solid theoretical and practical foundations. In our program, they are supervised by international professors who are not only academics, but also simultaneously practitioners, entrepreneurs, consultants or senior managers active in their field of specialization.

Our flexible, warm, demanding and personalized teaching environment, with direct access for our students to many experts, is ideally suited to the personal needs of all our learners. If you follow our social networks, you’ll see that, in particular, our female Alumnae are behind some of our greatest success stories.

To achieve this, we rely in particular on the research carried out by the doctoral students and professors in our doctoral school, who conduct their research on business transformation at a level that goes beyond the transformation of one company in particular to provide solutions that will have an impact at the level of an industry in general. Doctoral research topics mainly concern sustainable development, digitalization, artificial intelligence and entrepreneurial methods and tools. We also attach the utmost importance to ensuring that the MBA enables our students to develop their own leadership skills, through specific courses, but also more generally through the organization of teaching, which gives pride of place to personal exchanges, debates and group work.

Each MBA or Executive MBA participant works on a management report or entrepreneurial project at the end of the program. Our graduates all leave with a concrete project examined and validated by a panel of experienced practitioners in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. In fact, the availability of our professors to advise on the personal projects included in our MBA program led one of our participants to say: “I chose BSL because it’s the best consulting machine around.”

On the one hand, it allows you to truly protect the time you devote to your training by isolating yourself in a setting conducive to exchange and learning. On the other hand, it gives you access to the resources available on campus: graduate projects, career center, program management, professors, guest speakers and events. Of course, we are well aware that professional life often has intense and unpredictable periods when it’s not possible to come to campus. That’s why all modules taught on campus can be taken simultaneously online via a hybrid learning system.

For these senior profiles, it’s a question of solving a problem they encounter in their company, and for which neither the state of research – and therefore of available knowledge – nor practice provide satisfactory solutions. They solve this problem through research that will be applicable in the business world, and in so doing they obtain a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) from BSL. Like MBA training, the DBA program represents an opportunity for personal and professional development through collaboration with peers in a vibrant international research community.