A doctor of business administration (DBA) degree is harder and takes longer than an MBA. In January, Manchester Business School's DBA, which costs £50,000 (Dh290,782), was ranked number one in the world by the Financial Times. Jikyeong Kang, who directs the programme, was in the Emirates in January to seek suitable candidates. Here she discusses what she looks for, aside from a candidate's ability to pay.
What kind of person do you look for?
We are looking for someone with a bachelor's and master's degree, with a good grade, normally a first or a 2:1, but if it's a degree that they achieved 10 or 15 years ago, especially an undergraduate degree, we are not going to penalise someone … We are looking for someone who has shown a significant career progression, at least during the last six years. Sometimes what happens is we are very interested in somebody's work credentials, but on the other hand, if we do not see them as somebody who is able to create space to work on a doctoral degree, that person might not be the right candidate because it is a very rigorous programme.
Your DBA programme was ranked number one in the world by the Financial Times, so I guess you can afford to be choosy.
If [candidates] cannot complete the degree it does not reflect well on our achievement, so we are looking for people with the right kind of qualifications and the right kind of ideas … as far as their research programme is concerned.
How many people did you speak to on your trip?
Altogether we have probably had about 50 to 70 people. I had about seven people for face-to-face interviews, and I invited three people to formally apply.
What kind of people apply?
There are some very high-calibre people. I don't have the information to disclose their positions, so I will randomly talk about some of the students we currently have on the programme. There are about 20 people from this region who are working on a DBA programme, and they're at various stages. Companies represented [include] Emirates Group, Dubai Aluminium, Procter & Gamble, Saudi Aramco, Microsoft and Abu Dhabi Education Council.
These people are already very accomplished, so what is the point in doing a DBA?
This is one of the questions I ask as well, because it is very important that they start the programme with the right kind of motivation. I just interviewed a candidate who is a partner of a very large consultancy organisation that I do not want to name. He said 'I am in Abu Dhabi or Dubai once a week and the rest of the time I am travelling to see our clients'. I said 'do you think you can actually manage? Why do you want to do this?' You know, he gave me all the right answers in terms of why he wants to do it. And quite often, what they're interested in working on in terms of their research, their organisations are also interested in.
* Gillian Duncan
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