How online MBA courses at top management schools are enabling career transitions

NEW DELHI: Garima Arora quit journalism in 2022 to pick up a public relations and marketing job. Finding herself ill-equipped for the new role, she decided to go for an online MBA, offered by SVKM’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS).

Upon graduating this year, she joined as manager, corporate communications at Ola Electric and credits her programme for landing her the new role. “I shifted into public relations and wanted to learn the skills relevant to industry as I was facing issues,” she said.

“The role included decision-making, programme management and stakeholder management. The course helped me understand these skills and apply those in my role almost everyday,” she stated.

The growth of online MBA programmes over the past three years has been the result of two developments – the pandemic, which effectively pushed all programmes online for over a year, and the University Grants Commission’s permitting online degrees in 2021.

Management, at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, has become one of the most popular disciplines for online education. But there are challenges.

Students told Careers360 that they missed the benefits of peer interactions and learning as well as access to alumni networks.

Rashmi Subramanium, 27 and from Thane, Maharashtra, recently graduated from Mizoram University’s online MBA in entrepreneurship. She found the content updated and the quality of lectures and mentorship strong but absence of peer relationships and alumni connections were big gaps.

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Online MBA: No hands-on learning

The course helped Subramanium understand the concepts of entrepreneurship but didn’t provide any hands-on entrepreneurial activities.

“While we were made to read a lot of case studies, study materials and assignments, I felt that more community and workshops on brainstorming on how an idea moves from the prototype stage to a company, which is generally the entrepreneurship journey, was missing,” she explained.

Students were given multiple case histories, such as the story of Amul, banking after the 1992 reforms and more, but Subramanium would have preferred to have more chances to interact with people who are keen to start their own ventures, she said. She runs a non-profit organisation that works in education.

Further, Subramanium stated that hybrid models with some human interaction, like alumni meet-ups, help in networking because human touch is important in learning.

“While the course helped to understand different concepts of entrepreneurship, there were not many alumni meets organised which generally gives a leverage to a good institute where students can do networking and build connections. It is also important for a specialisation like entrepreneurship. But none of that happens in the course. This needs to be addressed. Online courses must have these meet-ups because learning the nuances of an MBA course includes the human touch,” she said.

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Finding new roles

Sheena Suresh is assistant vice president at HSBC. She credits her MBA from Indian Institute of Management Indore for her rise in the company.

“I chose this programme specifically for networking and secondly, because it was a senior management programme, it helped me grow into middle management,” said Suresh. “When I joined the course, I was an operations manager but by the time I finished this course, I had moved to a vice-president role in a generative AI company department. It helped my personal growth and also helped me learn many new concepts,” she said.

She added that the course’s capstone project helped a lot; she had opted for a project on environmental social governance (ESG) despite that being a new concept.

“One needs to leave whatever they have learnt earlier and try new horizons,” she said. “Through this, I created a tool for my organisation. I am elated that I could change myself from a finance manager to generative AI and learn something new in the ESG space. I built confidence despite the 360-degree shift in my mindset.” stated Suresh.

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Online MBA courses: Affordable, accessible

A key reason for the popularity of the online MBA is that it is accessible and affordable, said Subramanium.

“There has been a boom of MBA courses everywhere because it was easy to access online courses as affordability was a big factor,” she said.

Arora is similarly pleased with the return on her investment of Rs 4 lakh. “I deliberately chose a reputed institute and it was totally worth it. And multinationals and corporations value an MBA from a big b-school,” she added.

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Overall experience

Pankhuri Vohra, after shifting to public relations and marketing, also completed an online MBA offered by NMIMS and found the course material helpful. “The flexible timings and recorded course content came in very handy including social media, marketing, branding and data analytics,” she stated. He leads public relations and marketing at Sun Mobility in Bangalore.

“I was taught how digital marketing works for companies, how PR fits into marketing, including social media, influencer marketing, audience mapping and social listening tools, artificial intelligence, hard-core statistics, human resource business processes, how you manage data, organisational functional behaviour and many others,” added Arora.

Subramanium during her course was exposed to design thinking and social entrepreneurship. “Theoretically, I got a lot of material like access to some very influential thinkers and minds, good research papers, good recommendations for books – something that I would have not known otherwise,” she said.

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However, for Suresh, it wasn’t a particular course that helped her but the case studies and examination of real-life scenarios and decision-making. “After understanding the concept of marketing, regardless of the subject, case studies helped,” she said. “Discussions with professors and study groups gives you confidence to explore more opportunities. I was able to relate to a lot more new concepts.”