IF YOU’RE a mining engineer working in a British quarry it can be a long haul persuading anyone that you are international business material.
William Millard, 31, says: “I was a graduate trainee with a building materials company and I could see myself getting pigeonholed. I wanted to work internationally and expand the scope of my possibilities. But everyone sterotyped me as someone who dug holes in the ground and sold rocks.”
Today Millard is a management consultant with Deloitte in Copenhagen, having worked for two years as a project manager with Michelin in France. He successfully transformed himself by gaining a masters degree in international business at Grenoble Graduate School of Business in France. “The course gave me a good international perspective,” he says. However, it wasn’t just the course’s international content or the class’s cosmopolitan make-up that impressed Millard. He says that employers were attracted by the motivation and initiative he had shown by organising and funding himself to study abroad.
François Collin, an executive director of the Community of European Management Schools (CEMS), says that masters degrees in international management are popular with recruiters. CEMS is an alliance between 17 European business schools and 50 multinational firms, including BT, Deutsche Bank and Nokia, and caters for businesses’ appetites for globally aware workers. Studying in several countries prepares students to work within different cultures and in different languages while building a supportive international network.
Collin feels that a combination of the Bologna Accord, in which all European qualifications are standardised, and the needs of international companies means that a pre-experience masters in management will become the standard for international business recruitment. Our lack of linguistic ability and the tradition of hiring people with bachelors degrees into management programmes means that few Brits complete international masters degrees abroad. But Collin believes that is changing.
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“I am confident that the masters will become a requirement for an international career because that is what the companies want. It will become the norm to go and study abroad to get connections within international companies,” he says. A masters degree in business is still a bit of a rare beast, but, as Carol Lewis discovers, it will soon be the minimum standard