Financial Times Executive MBA 2020 rankings has wonderful plaudits for Henley Business School

THE recently released authoritative Financial Times Executive MBA 2020 ranking has some wonderful plaudits for Henley Business School – rating it the best in Britain and the fourth in the world for female faculty and placing it in the top 20 globally for women and international students.

The Executive MBA is also highly regarded in terms of graduates’ career prospects: top 10 in the UK, top 25 in Europe and top 50 in the world – with salaries spiking by an average of 44% three years after graduation. The degree is as well ranked too across all three areas for its Corporate Social Responsibility and the course work emphasis on subjects like ethics and social and environmental issues.

Henley Business School Africa’s dean and director Jon Foster-Pedley says that while he is extremely pleased at this most recent recognition for Henley, he is not entirely surprised.

“We have deliberately gone out to ensure that our faculty and our class composition fully and faithfully represent the realities of the markets we operate in, attracting the best very best of both, which can be seen through the results we achieve, all of which are blind-assessed in the UK.

“We have purposefully designed, and continually re-appraise, our MBA programmes to ensure that they are relevant both to the student, the work environment and the community, blending the very best of what we have locally and internationally.”

Henley Africa, from South Arica alone, currently provides 60% of the entire Henley MBA intake around the world and 75% of the flexible executive MBA cohort, which includes the UK, Finland, Denmark, Malta and Malaysia.

“In Africa we’ve made CSR part and parcel of the fabric of our lives through the innovative MBAid programme which we instituted more than 10 years ago, assisting more than 350 NGOs and NPOs to access management consulting worth hundreds of millions of Rands directly benefiting up to 70 000 people in South Africa since its inception,” says Foster-Pedley “and we have the largest self-funded MBA scholarship programme in Africa”.

2020 had provided the business school with a raft of challenges, not least of which was the COVID 19 pandemic and the government lockdown, he says.

“We successfully pivoted our entire teaching environment; our flagship MBA and all our executive education programmes seamlessly to a virtual teaching and learning platform, as well as developing a range of new courses and introducing the Advanced Diploma in Management Practice in March which completed the final rung in our unique ladder of learning which lets students progress from NQF level 5 to the executive MBA at NQF level 9, earning while they learn.”

Dr Anne Dibley, Henley UK’s MBA programme area director, said the business school was very proud of its diverse student body and world class faculty and especially the school’s success in continuing to attract women to its executive MBA global programme.

“Our Executive MBA’s global perspective and focus on responsible leadership enable us to develop outstanding business leaders ready to take on challenges and shape opportunities in today’s fast-moving and complex world. Supported by Henley’s faculty and staff and an experienced and diverse group of peers, our programme members develop the skills, and competences needed to achieve their career aspirations, whatever those aspirations may be.”

Those aspirations, says Foster-Pedley, have to be a determination to do whatever the graduates can to make the world a better place, after the rigours of the COVID 19 pandemic.

“We pride ourselves on building the leaders that build the businesses that build Africa – and indeed the world. The need for great business leaders able to work and thrive in a world of volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, disruption and diversity has never been as great as it is now,” he says.

“As United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez reminds us, we must build back better. The FT rankings are a timely reminder that the Henley Executive MBA programme is a wonderful tool to achieving exactly that.”

• Henley Business School Africa is a leading global business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and Africa. It holds elite triple international accreditation; has the number 1 business school alumni network in the world for potential to network (Economist 2017); and is the number 1 African-accredited and -campused business school in the world for executive education (FT 2018, 2020), as well as the number 1 MBA business school in South Africa as rated by corporate SA (PMR.Africa 2018, 2019, 2020).