MBA Specializations: Placing All Your Eggs in One Basket?

Traditional MBAs were designed to provide students with a wide skillset, from accounting and finance to human resources and marketing. A specialist MBA however, provides a much deeper level of knowledge of a narrower subject. Finance is a popular specialization, but marketing, IT, even sports management, and mining can be found, amongst others.

“MBA specializations emerged as a result of market demand, from specific industries’ needs,” says Chen Shimin, associate dean and MBA program director at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). Nevertheless, Chen suggests that caution should be exercised: “Specialized MBA programs cannot replace a reputable general MBA program.”

Professor Alfons Sauquet, dean of ESADE Business School in Barcelona, agrees the value of the MBA lies in a wide management overview, with electives catering for a student’s personal development and interests.

“Electives allow participants to focus on a particular area of interest. [They] work together to give the participant as clear a view of, say, finance as they have of strategy.”

For Sauquet, there is a place for specialist master’s degrees outside of the MBA sector which “develop specific competencies [and] are aimed at functional managers, rather than future leaders of organizations.”

Industry expertise

Many feel that MBA students who already know the industry they wish to move into – including those who are already there – could benefit from a specialist MBA offering a deeper study of said sector.

Professor Russ Morgan, associate dean for Fuqua’s daytime MBA program at Duke University, cites healthcare as an example where this could work. “Healthcare continues to be increasingly in need of well-prepared managers, and [Fuqua’s MBA with an HSM certificate] attracts extremely talented students,” he says. “Although the sector is broad, its structure has some fundamental differences that make specialized education valuable.”

Graduates, he continues, get an opportunity to add value to more general skills taught in the core MBA. “While the foundation of the Fuqua MBA is the development of skills in general management and leadership, a focus on breadth and depth in a specific area can provide skills that enhance or leverage [those] skills.”

After all, different sectors require different levels of unique knowledge. An experienced business leader with excellent management skills and working experience of financial companies who wants to move to greentech, could find a specialized program more valuable than a traditional program.

Deciding to specialize, however, is a risk; by default, specializing in one subject is a decision to cut out established aspects of traditional MBAs.

Yvonne Li, director of MBA admissions and career services at CEIBS, suggests that the great benefit of the traditional MBA is that graduates are able to find themselves employable in a large range of sectors and industries. “Students who [specialize] may find it challenging to move across industries.”

The importance of diversity and range of experience

The soft benefits of a generalized MBA may also be lost through specialization, and students “may also miss out on the diversity of classmates and experiences, as well as the more extensive alumni network that a generalized program provides,” adds Li.

“It is important to ask whether the benefits dropped or indeed the special knowledge gained could be obtained elsewhere. Is it really necessary, for instance, to forfeit the inter-industry contacts and management skills acquired at a traditional MBA if the benefits offered by a specialist MBA could just as easily be offered by a long-term internship in that chosen industry.

Similarly, sticking with a traditional MBA and deciding not to benefit from specialist knowledge may not be a wise choice if those management skills can be acquired through at-work training or other alternative routes.

“Most industries could benefit from MBA programs providing some additional depth in an area that aligns with their needs,” says Morgan. “In some, experience will be a good substitute. In others, experience may not provide what comes from the specialized courses in an MBA program.”

Morgan adds that the focus on the specialization should never be the decisive swing factor. Just as it was advised that a specialization can be used to leverage a foundation of good management skills from the core MBA, if the core MBA is no good then specialization will not help.

Once a specialist MBA with a solid core MBA has been found, the specialization should be put through just the same rigorous tests as any other MBA program. Who is teaching in the faculty? How are the courses managed? What do graduates go on to do and how many of them find relevant employment?

If a prospective student is confident in moving into a particular industry, can accept the balance between a narrower but deeper skill-set and makes a rational assessment of the specialization – in that there is no blind faith in its value – the specialist MBA could prove to be far more common in the near future.