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her first year Nuniam took traditional business courses such as finance, accounting and general management. In her second year, she took courses related to health care. Within that stream she focused further, studying international health care.

Her current project at Deloitte is helping a hospital design a system for managing patient processing and health records, and she hopes eventually to help clients in other countries.

Stephen Weiss, director of the MBA program at Schulich, believes the school’s 20 areas of specialization (21 including the International MBA) definitely provide an advantage when it comes to the job market.

“The key is to try to strike the right balance between breadth and depth, to add value to an organization right from the get-go,” he says. “Once the students have a solid foundation in the first year, we can serve them and their employers one step better by

eth Nuniam held an undergraduate degree

in health informatics and had a significant amount of experience working in the health care field. So when she was ready to do her MBA, it was natural that she would specialize in health care.

“I did consider going into other specializations, but based on what I know and my comfort level and my passion, I decided that it was health care for me.”

Nuniam graduated with an MBA in Health Industry Management from Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto in 2013 and soon landed a job as a consultant with Deloitte Canada. She is part of a new generation of MBAs looking for ways to stand out in a tight employment market where the MBA has become evermore commonplace and jobs evermore specialized.

She chose Schulich because of the reputation of its health specialty, which is 10 years old this year. As expected, during

going from there to studying some sectors in more depth.”

Schulich has more specializations than any other Canadian university. It started its first one, Arts and Media Administration, in 1968, the first of its kind in Canada.

Its newest offering is Global Retail Management, with cutting-edge courses such as Retail Analytics and Strategic Professional Selling.

Weiss says the most popular specializations are still in what is considered “management function” areas, such as finance and marketing, but that the industry-specific specialties are catching on, as are the topic-specific ones, such as business and sustainability.

“The ideal from the dean’s point of view is to do two specializations,” he says. “For instance, someone focusing on finance and doing global mining. It takes you one step closer to the workplace.”

Alberta’s Athabasca University, which traditionally has not been a provider of specialized

MBAs specialize to gain an edgeFrom health care to hockey, universities are offering more choices than ever to compete for students

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MBAs, has just announced a degree that is the first of its kind in the world. The Hockey Executive MBA is designed to draw expertise from Canada and beyond to help groom leaders in the business of Canada’s national sport.

“It’s going to solve what you could call a talent problem for hockey franchises,” says Michael Mauws, a business professor at the university and academic director of The Business of Hockey Institute, which is collaborating on the new degree. “People who gravitate toward the front office tend to be people who have played the game, but they don’t have the business acumen to rise to the top of those organizations. So now they will have a path that will get them to the top.”

The Hockey Executive MBA was the brainchild of Brian Burke, president of hockey operations for the Calgary Flames, and well-known player agent Ritch Winter, who were motivated by wanting to ensure a viable financial future for the game.

Athabasca is thinking big.“It’s not just NHL franchises

that we are talking about,” Mauws says. “We’re also talking about the American Hockey League, the Canadian Hockey League and hopefully some of the smaller ones.” He is hoping the program will eventually attract executives from Russia and Europe.

“We expect that a majority of our students will come from the front offices of pro and semi-pro sports franchises,” he says. “But we also would like to see some people who may be very successful executives in other industries who have a love for the game of hockey and would like to make a transition. That will help us to think outside the box about hockey.”

Specializations in business degrees are seen as the best fit for people with clear career paths. But for others, who aren’t quite sure of where they want to go, the traditional MBA is still a solid choice, according to Amir Muradali, president of the Association of MBAs in Canada.

Beth Nuniam holds an MBA in Health Industry Management from York University’s Schulich School of Business.

Michael Mauws is a business professor at Alberta’s Athabasca University and academic director of The Business of Hockey Institute.

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nline degree programs are becoming

increasingly popular because of their ability to accommodate work schedules and far-flung destinations. This is especially true of the Executive MBA, which appeals to mid-career professionals who want to augment their credentials without giving up hard-won jobs.

“Online MBA programs, in my view, are gaining popularity partly because of novelty, and partly because they provide access to an MBA for the segment that cannot afford to, or prefer not to, quit their jobs,” says Amir Muradali, president of the Association of MBAs in Canada. “All the MBAs I’ve met and spoken with who chose to do an online MBA did so because they wanted the flexibility to continue working and caring for their families.”

But online study also has other, less obvious benefits, advocates say. One is that courses can be designed to encourage increased collaboration among participants by flattening hierarchies and rewarding debate.

“In the traditional model, you have a professor standing at the front of the classroom and the students are more passive,” says Chris McLeod, director of marketing and communications in the Faculty of Business at Alberta’s Athabasca University. “In most classrooms, group interaction is an add-on to the stand-and-deliver model.”

But if courses are structured around collaboration and peer learning, as they are in Athabasca’s EMBA program,

students have a chance to gain valuable insights from people with diverse backgrounds in a variety of industries.

“The courses are facilitated by the professor, rather than being taught,” McLeod says. “It’s far, far richer, not just one person doing the leading.”

As opposed to videoconferencing, which is tough to co-ordinate over multiple time zones, course participation is asynchronous, which means that students can log in and share their thoughts in a written format over a period of days or weeks.

“You have time to really think about an idea or maybe do some research and talk about it with people from your company and to come back with a well-thought-out answer. And maybe to ask the next question,” McLeod adds. “We call this approach the democracy of the idea.”

In 1994, Athabasca University became a pioneer in the field of online education by starting the first MBA program in the world to be delivered online.

“We existed as a program before Netscape had its first browser,” McLeod says.

“There was a point in time when we had 100 per cent market share for online delivery of the MBA.”

Those were the days when students dialed up to access the program and had to load 14 discs into their computers for each course.

One early online MBA student at Athabasca, who lived in rural Saskatchewan, did his uploading and downloading from 1 o’clock to 4 o’clock in the morning. He was on a party line, so he had to ask his neighbours not to use the phone during that time because if anyone picked up, he would have to start over.

Since then, improved technology has made things easier and is another reason why online education is catching on. “Today, the last time I counted, there were about 249 online programs for MBAs in North America,” McLeod says. “Studies are saying that if it gets done well it is actually better than the traditional classroom.”

Online was certainly better for Shastri Ramnath, who was in Athabasca’s EMBA program from 2008 to 2012. During part of that time she was doing geological fieldwork in South America for a company in Sudbury and was often on the road.

“I remember lots of times driving around neighborhoods in various countries looking for WiFi so I could turn in my homework,” she says. “I could work wherever I was. The other part of it was that I was able to work at the time of day that worked for me. After dinner I would go to my room and work in until late, and on Saturday mornings.”

When Ramnath says the program changed her life, she’s not exaggerating.

“I took the entrepreneurial and visionary thinking course, and I learned that I was actually an entrepreneur,” she says. She’s now the president of her own 20-person consultancy, Orix Geoscience Inc.

Participatory models add value by tapping into expertise from a variety of industries and an array of perspectives

Online learning promotes ‘democracy of the idea’

Chris McLeod is director of marketing and communications in the Faculty of Business at Alberta’s Athabasca University.

O

Improved technology is helping to popularize online study.

“It’s far, far richer, not just one person doing the leading.”

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orn leader? Maybe. The phrase is a common one.

But while certain people seem to have an innate ability to rally the troops, many others work hard to acquire the necessary skills, both through education and on the job.

“I do think that some people are born leaders,” says Sheri McKillop, who earned an Executive MBA from the Sandermoen School of Business at the University of Fredericton and is now its associate dean.

Not surprisingly, as an educator she also believes that people can learn to lead. But she stresses the importance of real-world experience.

“I don’t think that learning about leadership is simply about learning theories about what leaders do,” she says. “Making mistakes is part of growing as a leader and you can’t do that unless you have the opportunity to put things into practice.”

One thing she has learned is the difference between management and leadership. Management, she says, is more “transactional,” making sure people stay on the right path. Leading is more strategic, setting the path for others to follow.

In her current job she wears both hats, having day-to-day responsibilities to work with

faculty, students and staff, while the more strategic part of her job involves identifying opportunities to keep the school’s curriculum on the cutting edge.

“It’s very easy to want to be involved in the details of making things happen, but there are times when you have to say, ‘I have really good people. I need to step back and let them do their jobs.’ And there are other times you need to get involved. A good leader needs to recognize those times and choose them wisely.”

Geologist Shastri Ramnath is another business school grad who has applied her knowledge and learned through experience. One of her most valuable leadership lessons came in a human resources course in the Executive MBA program at Athabasca University, where she learned that rewarding employees is about more than money.

“The course opened my mind about what it is that people really want. They want

to feel that they are good at something, that they are part of the team and that they have made a difference,” she says. “Once it was articulated in the coursework, I was able to recognize it was happening in the real world.”

After graduating in 2012, she co-founded Orix Geoscience Inc., a Toronto-based mining consultancy. As its president, she’s had plenty of opportunity to refine her leadership skills.

“What I learned through my education and my experience is that every person in the organization should be a leader,” she says. “The reality is that the person doing the job is the best person to make decisions about what they are doing, not the person above them, who is busy doing something else.”

Yes, leadership can be learned

This content was produced by The Globe and Mail’s

advertising department. The Globe’s editorial department was

not involved in its creation.

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Courses and experience can hone the skill

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