MBA and the midlife crisis
In May of last year, I started looking into the MBA at Skolkovo — I studied the program, talked with the curators, went to the presentation — and there happened a story that changed my perception of why long-term business education programs are needed in adulthood.
Once, during a tour of the Skolkovo campus, we visited the Executive MBA (EMBA) class. I looked at the list of issues discussed there and realized that they are more meaningfully interesting to me than the MBA program (to put it very simply, the MBA is about operational management, the EMBA is about strategic).
I shared my thoughts with the supervisor, to which she replied that she recommended I still consider an MBA: “The average age of EMBA students is 37-42. These are mainly top managers of corporations and owners of large businesses.”
Not to say that I had a spare 9 million rubles and I was eager for the EMBA, but the very fact of designing the program due to age limits interested me (the MBA also has them, approximately 28-33 years old): Why are they like that? Why do they even exist? Why do the programs last one and a half to two years – no more and no less?
I left the campus with these questions, as a result I did not go to the MBA, but the mystery remained unsolved.
And so, a year later, the giraffe got 🦒
It’s not about education
I am 33 years old and, from my observations of myself, friends and acquaintances, many of my peers are experiencing a midlife crisis. This is a process of professional burnout, a crisis of goal setting, finding meaning in one’s own activities and life, changing the environment, and it falls on one of two periods — either 28–33 years, or the same 37–42 years.
The state of crisis is rather difficult to bear – it lasts on average one and a half to two years, during which the first year one does not understand almost anything, there is no strength for anything, the psyche is in a so-called liminal transitional state (when you no longer want to be “as it was” but ” as it should” is not yet clear). In addition, the crisis is not easy to realize and notice that something is happening at all. And all the more to admit to ourselves that it seems we are entering a storm.
But our psyche has an unconscious “level” to overcome crises in automatic mode, and begins to look for points of support and stability. And one of these pillars is long-term management education programs — MBA for the first “wave” of the crisis and EMBA for the second.
It seems that a person buys an education and, as they like to say, “systematizes knowledge and skills”, but in fact he is [бессознательно] gains support in going through a difficult period of internal transformation – you have 18-24 months planned in advance, which means that life continues and there will definitely be light at the end of the tunnel.
Changing activities, topics and locations stimulates reflection and the search for new meanings, and the support of the group and teachers helps to maintain a sense of belonging – it is not for nothing that the majority of graduates testify that the most valuable thing for them was to find like-minded people, people with common goals, values and problems.
Do not look for “secret knowledge” in the MBA program – people are not paying for a course of lectures on finance or solving pressing business issues, but for an “insurance kit” that will help them cope with uncertainty and get through a difficult period of internal crisis.
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