Developing international careers for managers on the Lancaster MBA
Published 26 January 2009
The FT's latest ranking of the world’s top 100 full-time global MBA programmes brings out Lancaster’s growing internationalism as a management school and as an MBA programme.
The Lancaster MBA’s continued presence amongst the world's top 30 MBA programmes – this year ranked 27th in the world, 10th in Europe and 4th in the UK – can at least partly be attributed to the international dimensions measured by the Financial Times, which considers them important to the global status of MBA programmes. It is not only the Financial Times that thinks this way: many Lancaster MBA students, alumni and our corporate clients see international capability as increasingly important, and a very distinctive aspect of the Lancaster MBA.
An important dimension of career progress measured by the FT is International Mobility, which is calculated according to whether alumni worked in different countries before doing their MBA, on graduation and also where they are employed today. Our alumni's career mobility has placed the Lancaster MBA in the top third of the world’s MBA programmes on this measure in each of the last five years. In short, the trend is towards increasing international mobility in an already very international programme.
MBA students from the class of 2008 on a tour of the Cullinan Diamond Mine in South Africa.
It is not only the students that are becoming more international. Lancaster’s high-flying faculty – rated amongst the UK’s elite for the last 20 years – are becoming more international too. Five years ago less than a quarter of the core faculty at LUMS were international (i.e., originating from somewhere other than the UK), whereas now about a third are international. This is a consequence of several factors, such as:
Lancaster’s insistence on recruiting the best faculty irrespective of nationality (as part of a wider commitment to equal opportunity as well as the highest standards);
the increasingly global nature of the labour market for business school faculty;
Lancaster’s rapidly rising reputation; and the continuing international reach of the School through alliances, exchanges, research links, international delivery of programmes and global executive education programmes such as the Global Advanced Leadership Programme.
When you add to that the tremendous cultural diversity of the class each year, and the international diversity and experience of LUMS’ Advisory Board of senior executives, you have a School that is really tuned into today’s economic challenges and helping shape the world of the future.
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