THE Master's of Business Administration (MBA) degree is a hot favourite among graduating students and working professionals, alike.

You can choose from a one-year Executive MBA or a two-year programme. So, which one is for you?

You'd be surprised to know that both make very different assumptions of their students and cater to different needs. Let's put things in perspective, so you choose the right programme.

I'm leaning towards a one-year MBA but I'd like to be clear on certain facts before taking a decision. What are the benefits of a two-year vis-à-vis the one year programme? Given today's dynamic environment is the two-year MBA programme headed towards redundancy?

-- Maya Jain, marketing professional from Mumbai

Get the basics right

A two-year MBA programme is the original MBA format. Students go through 11 or 12 hours of classroom training and a summer internship after the first year. The whole programme does not demand any prior knowledge of business on the part of the students and therefore, concepts are built almost from scratch. The emphasis on academic building blocks is more pronounced.

So, for instance, in a two-year format you would undergo two courses on quantitative methods where statistics are taught from scratch and eventually connected to business decision making. You get to understand the basics in great detail since the course is structured on a belief that you have no prior knowledge. Hence this course is more detailed and is spread over two terms.

The programme of the one-year format is condensed from 21 months to between 12 and 15 months. This means that the time you to spend in a one year programme is not 50 per cent, as is commonly perceived, but about 65-70 per cent.

Read: My salary increased four times after my MBA

Got a question related to MBA or any other programme for Sanjay? Post your queries. Mention your name, age, location and designation.

Executive MBA, decoded

A one-year programme is crisp and more intense. The is because the programme assumes that students have basic exposure to the business world, and hence does not commence training with basic principles.

It does not give you as much time as a two-year programme, to comprehend and grasp a subject. It also does away with the internship, to save time because there's an assumption that students are exposed to a real business environment, already.

Hence while most courses are covered in a one-year programme, the time spent on each is relatively less and some of the courses may be combined. For example, the quantitative Methods 1 and 2 that we briefly sited earlier may be combined into a single statistical decision-making course where the emphasis is more on inference than learning from first principals.

Read: How to pay for your Executive MBA

Illustration: Abhijeet Kini

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e-mail: Sanjay Chaudhary

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