Benefits of a public education

Public sector MBAs give officials the skills they need to serve the public more effectively

As the MBA has flourished and gained acceptance, it has diversified, and one of its main variants offers the chance to specialise in some or all aspects of the public sector, be it local or central government, health, education, social services, or the voluntary sector. Schools now offering a public sector MBA include Aston, Henley, Birmingham, Leeds Nottingham, and Exeter.

The impetus behind the public sector MBA is the growing need for sophisticated management skills in the increasingly complex and competitive environment facing public sector organisations. Sometimes demand has come directly from the organisations themselves, as in the case of the Public Sector MBA established in 1994 by a consortium of schools - Cranfield, Imperial College and Manchester Business School, in conjunction with the Civil Service College.

"The original criteria was that it was for civil servants identified in their mid-twenties as potential high flyers," says Andrew Dyson, director of academic services at Manchester Business School. "The MBA offered a fast-track into top civil service grades after they came out." Although the aim is to groom people to fill senior civil service posts, it is also open to other UK or international public sector managers.

"Basically it's a general MBA with some specialised electives and projects," says Dyson, "The Cabinet Office wanted something fairly generic where their students could mix with people from the private sector, but offering elements like governmental policies, social policy, theory of government, and a project where they can put into practice their general theory into civil service or local government context." Taking into account all the electives, projects and specialist dissertations, students spend around a third of the programme specialising in their own sector.

But one of the first, and largest providers, of public sector MBAs is the School of Public Policy at the University of Birmingham, working in conjunction with the university business school. As well as full- and part-time MBAs, it runs another for the international public sector, taken by students from 17-18 countries, and a Hong Kong version specifically geared towards developing a public management agenda after the handover to China.

The School also delivers programmes for specific organisations or groups of organisations like Birmingham City Council, and the West Midlands police service. In total it has around 220 current public sector MBA students, and over 100 academic staff.

"We try and put people together from variety of different agencies so they learn a lot more about how each other work," says Dr Chris Skelcher, MBA admissions officer at Birmingham.

Nottingham is another big provider, with 100 students taking MBAs in education, health, the voluntary sector, criminal justice and local government, and studying specific elements like public services law and policy, and entrepreneurship and change in the public services, as well as the more common MBA core elements.

"A fundamental part of the programme is participating with managers from many different backgrounds within the public sector," says Graeme Currie, director of the MBA in public services, who also invites visiting speakers from various sectors to provide live case studies. Typically students are senior managers - around 10-15 years experience is not unusual - compared with students on generic courses who are often in their mid to late twenties with just three years or so in management. "Public sector managers need to get to a fairly senior position before getting funding for an MBA," explains Currie.

So what are the advantages of doing a specific public sector MBA? "The main difference is our starting point," says Skelcher. "Our MBA is really to do with the particular values of the public sector, in the sense of managing scarce resources well, and also in terms of serving different communities with different needs."

"A lot of managers in the public sector have a professional qualification or masters degree in their specific area, so we're trying to add value to that by addressing how one can get different professions to work collaboratively together on issues that cut across organisational boundaries. "

Currie believes that the public sector is fundamentally more difficult to manage than the private sector. "The politics are much more complex," he says, "especially with increasing central government intervention. Basically the public sector is unmanageable according to rational private sector theory, so we encourage discussion about to what extent those theories are applicable."

Nottingham also tailors its frameworks so they are applicable to the public sector. "Accountancy and finance in the private sector, for instance, are totally different to the public sector, so doing generic modules is a lot less applicable and useful," says Currie.

Not only does the content differ, but students' motivations for doing a public sector MBA tend to be very different to those going on generic courses, says Skelcher. "The Labour government has developed a huge public sector change programme and these people are trying to grasp all that means."

They also want to develop their capacity to manage more effectively in this new environment, he believes. "While people on private sector MBAs expect a significant salary increase when they finish, in the public sector these kinds of salary rewards aren't there. It's about them wanting to serve the public more effectively and working on new kinds of projects. They're very altruistic, especially considering a lot of people on this programme are paying for it themselves."