In case you’ve stumbled on this blogpost in case you googled “reflective learning” and “MBA”, it’s probably worth me saying what ‘reflective learning’ is. I don’t have a precise definition, but it’s something like assessing what you’ve learnt from a learning experience. This just doesn’t mean the new facts or information that you’ve ‘learnt’, but thinking about your personal reactions to what you’ve done; whether it has changed your attitudes to the subject, indeed changed your behaviour and skills.
I started my MBA in January 2011, and last Friday I discovered that the Examinations Board at BPP had recommended me for the award of MBA in the graduation ceremony in May 2012. I attended seminars and lectures at the BPP Business School, St Mary Axe, right in the heart of the City. I have passed all my exams, and I feel it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience. I enjoyed the seminars we had weekly in each subject, and certainly the quality of your experience is dependent on other people in your class having done the reading! The required reading is indeed voluminous, but I understand there are national requirements about the rough quantity of it. In my case, the online library at BPP became my best friend, and I used to enjoy skim-reading elegant papers on my #ipad2.
The MBA is a superb vehicle for anyone wishing to be at the cutting edge of management. The range of subjects is diverse. Some of what I studied in detail includes change management, types of leadership, costing, budgeting, organisational culture, strategy models, competition, pricing, international marketing, performance-related pay, and value creation in innovation. You realise early-on that there are no precise answers, although in industry you are somewhat obliged to present an air of certainty. The highlight for me was the economics course, where I studied in detail information asymmetry and price differentiation, for example relevant to insurance markets. I also greatly enjoyed learning about and discussing ‘notions of value’, which makes you understand the precise relationship between price, cost and value.
A Professsor of Law at the University of London once told me that nothing I learnt ever would go to waste. I am currently loving the Legal Practice Course at BPP Law School, but I believe my MBA was a worthwhile experience in isolation, as well as being potentially relevant to understanding clients at a senior level in corporate law. Many lawyers like to think that they understand business and finance, but I feel some lawyers should be sufficiently humbled as to appreciate that business, finance, accounting, marketing and innovation, for instance, constitute demanding specialties in themselves. I don’t regret doing my MBA for a second, and it has certainly given me a thirst for learning and continuous professional development, whatever I ultimately decide to do. I have a similar attitude towards my Master of Law in International Professional Legal Practice from the College of Law.
