Attempts by colleges and universities to meet the seemingly endless demand for master’s degrees in business administration (MBA) have resulted in a worldwide explosion in business education programmes. Ukraine is no exception, with over 300 universities, colleges, academies and institutes around the country authorised by the Ministry of Education to provide degree-level business training.
Unfortunately, however, most of the training offered is inadequate and only half-a-dozen of the MBA programmes in Ukraine come anywhere near reaching standards that would be accepted in western Europe and North America.
Foreign programmes dominate
Perhaps the best option for those in Ukraine seeking high quality business education has come through programmes subsidised by a number of foreign governments. The programmes with the largest number of openings and generally considered the most desirable are those financed by the US, particularly the Muskie Fellowship Programme, named after former US senator Edmund Muskie who proposed the scheme.
Today, hundreds of young Ukrainians in their late twenties to mid-thirties who have completed such internationally-supported education programmes now occupy supervisory or mid-management level jobs in many of Ukraine’s leading companies, such as banks and industrial firms.
However, every year, tens of thousands of high school graduates and those already employed find their efforts to gain an MBA thwarted by a combination of factors - the low quality and relatively high cost of most national MBA programmes, the very limited number of places available in foreign-subsidised programmes, and the high cost of those few MBA programmes in Ukraine that come close to meeting international standards.
One recent development seems to partly address the situation. Rowan University of New Jersey has concluded an agreement to implement joint business training programmes in Ukraine.
Training programme in Donetsk
Rowan University’s School of Business and its College of Professional and Continuing Education have developed Six Sigma, an advanced management system that has been adopted worldwide by such industrial giants as Toyota and Motorola.
Just a few weeks ago, the first team of faculty members from Rowan arrived in Donetsk, the main city in Ukraine’s industrialised Donbass region.
Sponsored by the Donetsk Chamber of Commerce and Industry in cooperation with Sterling Business School of Ukraine (SBS), the Rowan faculty members spent two days providing very intense training to a group of more than 40 Donetsk-based managers and supervisors. The methods, which include lectures and role play situations, were new to most of the students, but they soon grasped and embraced the concepts and showed their appreciation for the pace of the training. At the end of the two-day course, the students were given certificates attesting to their completion of the first phase of the Six Sigma programme.
Hopes for future developments
“We believe our partnership with Rowan, built around a building-block concept of highly sophisticated short-term training programmes, will soon lead to a fully developed system that takes advantages of such technologies as video conferencing to bring higher quality business education to Ukraine with greater efficiency and at lower cost,” says SBS founder Reno Domenico, a New Jersey educator who recently retired from the state educational system in order to further his 15-year long association with schools in Ukraine.
Looking at future development, Gennady Chizhikov, President of the Donetsk Chamber of Commerce, says: “It is our hope that in the very near future we will be able to offer here in Donetsk an MBA programme tailored to the needs of our emerging industrial business managers. I believe our partners, Rowan University and Sterling Business School, share this goal.”
