Africa’s top leading business school, Lagos Business School in collaboration with several companies recently held a career fair for their MBA graduating students. In this interview, Uchenna Uzo, the MBA Director spoke to FRANK ELEANYA on the school’s plans to expand the program to accommodate more students.
Tell us about the MBA career fair
This is the 14th year of carrying out this fair. The idea of the fair is to get our MBA students to engage with the industry and get the industry to engage with the MBA students. The idea is to partner in growing talents that would meet management development in the African landscape. In this event, we typically choose a theme which we discuss extensively, after which the students make their presentations around the theme on specific industries. After that there is an initiation of a recruitment exercise which then leads to them being placed in particular companies that participated in the fair or outside the fair.
How would you describe the recruitment rate, on a scale of 1-5?
On a scale of 1-5, we are doing between 4 and 5. But within the first 9 months upon graduation we place 92% of the student population and within the first 12 months everyone is placed. Now, we are striving not just for local placements but placements in different parts of the world too.
You mentioned that your school has two certificates whereas some schools around the world can only boast of one and currently your school is also the number one in Africa. How does that impact the decision the school has to make when running the MBA program?
We have two accreditations; one is the accreditation given by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) which accredits business schools in the world. The second is a program specific accreditation for the MBA which is given by the Association for MBAs. These two accreditations are the global accreditations for business schools and MBA programs. And there are a few schools in Africa that have these accreditations but we are positioning to be number one. According to Financial Times Ranking we are number three now but our vision is to become number one as soon as we can.
It raises the bar in terms of the quality of applicants we are looking to recruit into the program. They have to have the requisite experience and intellectual skills. They have to have good GMAT and GRE scores to stand tall and compete with other exchange students that the school is ready to receive. They have to be marketable as we would send them out to be placed in international roles. So they need to possess some basic skills and abilities. What that means is that we are going to be refining to make our admission and recruitment processes better, and even our scholarship process so that we can get the very best but also give them the financial support they need to pass through the entire program.
Being number one in Africa should come with a lot of pressure to maintain that standard and a lot of pressure from demand to apply to the school. Do you ever find yourself in a position where you cannot take all the students who have applied and you have to send them to other schools?
This is a premium program and I would not say that we have gotten to that stage where we can cope with demand. And in selling a premium program sometimes, we at some point experience issues with affordability as not everyone can afford to pay. That is why the scholarship and loan schemes are being positioned to bridge that gap. We foresee that with these two global accreditations we have gotten – and we are already seeing it from this year, we have had to have two streams of Executive MBA from January instead of one in a year just to accommodate all the people and we foresee that the trend is likely to rise but again. We have plans for expansion and so we should be able to cater for those who would come.
In terms of the quality of teaching, seeing that your students come from different backgrounds and some may have graduated for a long time and may not be as grounded or knowledgeable as you expect them to be; how do you get all the students to that point where they are ready for the market?
First of all we do not accept fresh graduates anymore. In the last two years we have increased the bar in terms of the years of experience required. They have to have practiced in the industry for at least three (3) years. For them to have been recruited by those companies they must have gone through some levels of polishing before the come here. They have to write the GRE or GMAT which are not easy exams to take. They require a certain level of knowledge of Mathematics and English, and to test their analytical competence. The whole process of preparing for the test is a good brush up experience for the students. After passing through the interview process where we do a lot of behavioral screening and interpersonal traits they might have, they have a one month brush up program with us before they start the MBA program proper. At this stage, we put a lot into getting them ready, mathematics, English, basic communication, writing, speaking, and even dinning etiquette, everything that they need to know before they even start the program. We also assign them to a communications coach – because that is a big program in this market, whose role is to keep monitoring their improvement in their communications skills while they are on the program. Also, we constantly expose them to industry, they have career for a, the career fair is the big one we hold for them but there are many others. We have CEOs networking session where we invite a CEO each month they get to network. Somehow that whole process prepares them for the market such that after 18 months of being here, we equip them well enough to face the market.
What influences your decision as to where a student is placed when he comes for the first time? Your program is it more of Entrepreneurship?
It is a blend. The MBA is a general management program, it is not an MBA that is focused on one area of specialization. We try to achieve breathe and depth at the same time. What we do is that we expose them to entrepreneurship. They are required to start a new business idea of their own and we give them some seed-money to start and experience the process. We also expose them to consulting so we are in partnership with the Enterprise Development Center (EDC). It is our centre for entrepreneurship owned by the same Pan Atlantic University and they serve as consultants to entrepreneurs here. It is a fast way to know what it takes to be an entrepreneur and to deal with complex problems that the businesses have. If you are working in a very established setting you might not be exposed to kind of things and at the same time we prepare them for paid employment. But what we have seen is that many of them do not start their own businesses immediately but within 5 or 10 years of graduating, most end up doing their own thing. Somehow we prepare them for both worlds.
What are the tools that would prove most relevant to those who have graduated and are in the market in this recession period?
Firstly, they would need to have an innovative mindset. Clearly, in this time what the consumer seeks now is high value for low cost and so you need an innovative mindset to champion the creation of high valued products that are at the same time affordable. This creative needs innovative thinking, hence driving a culture of innovation in the organizations where they are would matter a lot. Secondly, the values they hold strongly to would help them stand out, like integrity, mutual respect, and professionalism as they are important to succeed in a work place. Whether we are in a recession or not those values will continue to be important. We really try to impact these values while they are here. The values are traded throughout the curriculum not that we have standalone courses with these key values. Thirdly, the continuous process improvement that is the ability to gain new knowledge that would make them adapt to any changes that would come in the future. That is something we can happily say we know how to do. We help them with scenario planning, that is planning for the unexpected. That is one of the strong traits of those who have passed through the Business school. They know how to win in a complex market because they know how to adapt to change.
How do you sustain the relationship when they are out of program?
We have a strong Alumni Association; there are about 6,000 of them. We have monthly alumni meetings and an annual Alumni day. This year we are launching an MBA Alumni Network that would allow our graduates to also be in constant touch with the current students. We also have their birthday dates, their weddings or social occasion where we always have a representation.
What is your relationship between the companies out there and the MBA program?
They are our recruiting partners and we partner with them to develop the talent they need to lead the companies they represent. We also do some form of consulting for some of them where we assign Faculty members along with students to help them solve particular problems. We have a strong internship program where they are not there to act the way undergraduate interns do, they are more of consultants. We demand from the organizations that they give us very clear and ambitious projects for these students to carry out over a period of 3-4 months under the supervision of faculty members of the school. At the end of the program, a number of organizations are able to say they have been able to deal with particular problems. We also have memorandum of understanding with some of the companies where we train their organizations’ staff at subsidized rates. It is kind of a partnership with them.
