MBA

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The value of an MBA specialized in human resources has grown as the relationship between companies and their employees has gotten more complex. The days are long gone when all employees got two weeks off and basic medical insurance. Nowadays, hiring and retaining good workers involves assembling a benefits package that can include medical, disability, travel and other types of insurance, retirement investment packages, education benefits and vacation policies. Human resources pros are also charged with overseeing modern work environments where individuals and companies are bound by strict anti-discrimination laws. They also spearhead the creation of procedures for hiring and, unfortunately, sometimes firing employees that protect a company from potential lawsuits.

Although some people progress to senior HR positions without a specialized business degree, an MBA in human resources can give you a significant advantage in getting hired for this type of position, particularly by larger companies. While the “core” courses in your MBA will give you a good grounding in overall business principles (that can be useful to you should you move out of human resources later in your career) the HR specialization part of your degree will cover issues like compensation procedures, legal issues in human resources, industrial psychology, performance appraisal, workforce environment management, recruitment and employee development. This is a degree that can definitely be obtained through online learning.

Careers & Salaries With A Master of Business Degree in Human Resources
An median salary for a human resources professional is approximately $99,000., according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But a Vice President of HR can earn well over $130,000., and be considered a key senior manager in a large company. Demand for HR specialists is expected to grow at a higher rate than many other job areas, as more medium-sized companies, health care facilities, universities and government agencies look to bring in people with specialized skills in human resources.

Some of the most common job titles in human resources are:

• Human Resources Director or Vice President of Human Resources
  This person oversees all aspects of employment for the company, working with division heads to see that standard policies are used to deal with all employee issues. The position frequently reports directly to the company CEO, and involves managing many smaller HR departments around the world at all the company locations. Communication skills are very valuable at this level, along with an understanding of how to compensate very senior managers, doing diligence and integration planning when there are mergers or acquisitions being considered, and handling compliance issues in an international context. The MBA in human resources is highly valued of you aim for a very senior position like this.
• Director of Compensation or Compensation Specialist
  A specialist in compensation will be charged with making sure that a company’s pay packages are in line with what competing companies offer for specific positions, classifying jobs along compensation lines and seeing basic employee qualification standards. The job can involve doing market research, surveys and even creating statistical models for compensation, which may include incentive payments in addition to base salary. Compensation specialists also ensure that company pay policies comply with state and federal regulations.
• Recruitment & Development Specialist
  Creates and implements company policies on advertising job openings, promoting from within versus hiring from outside, and screening of all job applications. Once a new employee has been hired, the recruitment specialist will ensure that he or she is set up with everything from an office space to a computer, a health care package and that any special needs are met. Employees today have choices to make about which insurance and retirement benefits they want and how much of their salary they want to contribute to them, which they decide on with the help of a human resources development specialist.
• Director of Employee Relations
  The employee relations director must monitor the overall work environment to make sure it’s maximizing the productivity of employees, and that disputes and conflicts that arise are being resolved in a way that’s professional and which complies with employment laws. This requires an expertise in reading and interpreting employment laws. In a very large company or a university, the employee relations head will manage an ongoing affirmative action play that ensures that minorities are being given opportunities. Alternatively, the job can involve working with the company lawyer to investigate complaints or even lawsuits against the company.
• Benefits Specialist
  The benefits specialist is usually the HR person who gets the most phone calls from employees with questions. People call when they need to know exactly what their insurance coverage is if they have just been diagnosed with an illness, how big a severance package they will receive if they are terminated, and how changes in certain laws will affect them. A classic example is the change in medical coverage for children included in the 2010 health care legislation. It mandates that children who have graduated from college can still be on their mother or father’s company health plan up to age 26, which they could not in most cases previously. Employees all over the country are now calling their benefits specialists asking when that provision actually kicks in, how much it will cost them, and other related questions. The benefits specialist job may also include building a database for tracking all benefit costs to the company, helping to resolve employee insurance claims and suggesting changes to benefit policies.

Unique Skill Set
An MBA in human resources can help you develop the particular skills for an HR career. First and foremost among these is an ability to communicate with a wide variety of people who run from very junior to most senior job positions, and managers who need to know how HR rules impact all sorts of different departments. The degree helps teach both verbal and written skills in this area. The larger the company you work in, the more likely it is that you’ll be asked to develop a very deep understanding of one particular aspect of employee management. Human resource specialists in small to medium sized companies need to have a more generalized knowledge of all employment issues.

While companies are obviously focused on profit, it also remains true that getting the right employees and keeping them satisfied remains extremely important. Maximizing retention of quality people is a goal that companies will reward the HR manager for reaching.

Courses for an MBA in Human Resources
In addition to generalized business courses, your MBA in human resources is likely to include specialized courses in these areas:

Employment Law: Workplace harassment, discrimination issues, regulatory compliance, ethics, analyzing law, liability avoidance, safe workplace practices.

Employee Development: HR strategy, creating training objectives, employee counseling, training delivery, factors influencing employee behavior, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness.

Strategic Rewards Approaches: Rewards systems to motivate and retain employees, pay structures, payroll practices, and compensation types.

Recruitment & Hiring: Fundamental of attracting talent, selecting quality hires, pay package negotiation, assessment techniques, job promotion procedures.

Next: The broad and varied opportunities with an MBA in Management

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An MBA in management is one of the most broad-focused – and least limiting – graduate business degrees. Unlike a finance MBA, which will tend to land you either in banking or in a corporate finance department, or an MBA in healthcare, which will stream you into a job at a healthcare institution in most cases, the management MBA is a degree that can be applied in just about any type of company on earth. It’s a particularly good degree to look at if you have some experience managing a particular function or business unit, and would like to move up to a more senior position where you oversee many different business activities. It’s quite possible to wind up having a group of people with MBAs in specific areas like marketing or human resources reporting to you as a cross-disciplinary executive with a management MBA.

Management MBA graduates can be found doing everything from running a small local business to acting as CEO of large multinational corporations. The degree can offer a high degree of freedom to move into a business in manufacturing, marketing, real estate, technology or other category. Your master’s program in management will generally be designed to give you high quality skills in managing people, improving operations, and organizing the work of various departments to ensure that the profit goals of the company are being met. You can also potentially use this knowledge to start your own business if you prefer. Should you decide to go the entrepreneurial route, you may have a better chance of getting bank loans or investment commitments with an MBA management than you would without an advanced business degree.

Creative Business Skills
This degree can broaden your skills in communication and critical thinking. Top managers are called upon to look at information about their own companies and competitors, and use a great deal of creativity to come up with new solutions to business problems as they arise. They also need to be good at presenting their ideas to other top managers in order to get approval and, often, funding for the new products they want to create. Crisis management is another key knowledge area, since all businesses encounter new problems each year. Above all, they need to be good at managing people, to make sure their employees – from the junior level right up to the top – are as productive as possible.

Courses For The Managment MBA
Many good MBA programs in this area present you with a series of hypothetical problems and opportunities for a business, and require you to come up with a best course of action you can defend effectively. Key course you’ll take in most management MBA programs include:

• Financial Accounting
• Management of Marketing
• Strategic Human Resources Management
• Teamwork
• Statistics
• Managing Change
• Leadership Techniques
• Global Business
• Analysis of Organizations
• Management Ethics & Legal Issues
• Competitive Analysis
• Business Technology / Decision Support Systems
• Managing in Cross-Cultural Environments

A Wide Range of Salaries
Salaries vary tremendously for MBA management graduates. While some small company managers will earn under $110,000 per year, it’s quite possible to leverage this degree towards a position in the most senior ranks of a large company, where salaries can run in excess of $200,000. per year (Source: Payscale.com).

A master’s in business management generally takes two years of full-time study, like most other MBA programs. There’s a huge variety of schools that offer this kind of degree online. Many offer accelerated programs that can get you finished in less than two years if you work as quickly as possible. A few schools also offer this and other MBA’s as as one-year “completion” programs if you already have a bachelor’s degree in business.

Click To A List Top Schools Offering MBA Degrees Online

A high-end project manager can work on improving the efficiency of a manufacturing plant, redesigning a company’s computer systems, or overseeing the construction of anything from a building to a large public project like a bridge or hydroelectric dam. Companies and governments have a difficult time getting large one-time projects like this done on time and within set budgets, because they almost always involved organizing the work of many different types of specialists – some from within the company and others brought in as outside contractors. The project manager is, effectively, a highly skilled general contractor who keeps all the pieces of a project moving forward. MBAs are hired for this type of work because the financial stakes on a large project can be extremely high.

An MBA in project management is designed to give you expertise in taking a company’s project objective and drawing up a strategy for getting it done. Job responsibilities in this specialty can include mapping out a very complex series of specific deliverables on a project with dates attached to them, delegating responsibilities, and then taking responsibility for communicating to your company’s senior management on how the project is progressing. It can be a sometimes stressful job, but also one that is not repetitious and requires you to exercise creativity in solving problems. Leadership and conflict mediation skills are highly valued in this career path.

Design, Procurement and Management
Advanced subjects typically studied in an MBA project management degree program typically include budgeting, analysis of project profitability, managing risk, cost & schedule monitoring, procurement and quality control. Managerial accounting and economics are also important, largely because project managers have to create detailed reports on the financial benefits of each new project.

A good project manager can be an extremely important person to a company that’s struggling to modernize a particular department, or even the entire enterprise. It’s also a specialty that can be “portable,” allowing you to work in many different industries during your career.

It can also be lucrative. A project manager with a master’s degree in business can earn anywhere in a range from $50,000. per year to over $150,000. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), depending on which industry you are in. Pharmaceutical manufacturing, chemicals and construction are pay some of the highest salaries for this job position.

Sample job listings calling for candidates with an MBA specialized in health care management:

• “Associate Director, Project Management” for a large digital marketing and advertising agency. Job involves working with clients to see that they are supplying all needed materials for custom projects, managing their expectations and keeping all projects moving ahead on schedule and on budget. Skills needed include and ability to communicate well verbally and in writing, advanced knowledge of Microsoft Project and various web technologies, budgeting skills and the ability to keep multiple projects organized.
• “Real Estate Project Director” for a large property managment company. Involves oversight of budgets, cost forecasts, and organizing the efforts of creative, marketing and engineering departments. This is a senior position that includes responsibility for seeing that very large construction projects adhere to environmental impact guidelines and are delivered on time. An engineering background is helpful.
• “Director of Project Management” for a hospital. A position that is part of the strategy and busines development section of the company, and which involves improving efficiency of a very wide rance of processes involving patient care, diagnostics, nursing, staffing, facilities maintenance and more. Project manager designs new systems and then oversees their construction and implimentation.
• “R&D Project Manager” for a biotech company. Organizes and helps manage clinical trials of new medicines with teams of researchers, and ensure that government standards are met on studies that will be submitted for regulatory approval. Requires a knowledge of risk/benefit analysis.

Next: An MBA in Human Resources

Click To A List Top Schools Offering MBA Degrees Online

By Susan Ott

If you’ve already obtained your undergraduate degree and want to move upward in a career in business, you’re probably seriously considering getting your MBA. And while this graduate degree can propel you forward in your chosen business career, it’s important to weigh the costs and benefits before jumping into an MBA program. Many prospective students fail to really think through what the Return On Investment (ROI) will be from getting a degree. Before you even start looking at schools that offer MBA programs, sharpen your pencil and figure out if it’s the smart thing to do in your situation.

How to Calculate the True Value of an MBA
There are many MBA ROI calculators on the internet, but none of them can give you an exact reading on what your return will be, since so many of the factors are subjective. That being said, you should be able to quickly get a general idea of what your total investment in an MBA will be and how long it will take to recoup that cost and start to truly profit from it.

The most simplistic way to calculate your ROI is to total the cost of your schooling (including books and other additional costs), figure out how much more on average you will make per year with your MBA, and calculate how many years it will take to pay down your investment. That will at least give you a snap calculation of how quickly you can be debt free, and enjoying any salary increase you’ve achieved as a pure profit.

Let’s say, for example, that your MBA will cost $50,000 total, and upon graduation you believe you can expect a salary increase of $20,000 a year. If you choose to put all your salary increase toward paying off school costs, you’ll be able to start enjoying the higher salary free and clear after two and a half years. Plan to work for 10 more years? Even without a raise, you would have a minimum $200,000 return on your school investment.

A Baseline Value Estimate to Start From
That is certainly an over-simplified way of looking at the numbers, particularly since many people don’t immediately use their entire salary increase to pay down school debts. But it’s a good baseline calculation to start from. To calculate your own numbers, try to get a clear picture of how long you plan to work, based on your age, what kind of salary increase you can realistically get from an MBA in the particular business you want to go into and, of course, the cost of the school you are planning to attend.

Some good news to keep in mind is that online schools generally offer a lower total cost of an MBA than brick and mortar schools. But even within the online school category, you can benefit from being a smart shopper. Many lower-cost online MBA programs have emerged in recent years. Well-known schools like Western Governors University and New England College of Business and Finance, for example, offer MBA programs online at a total cost of less than $22,000., even before financial aid is calculated in. That’s a far cry from the more typical private school cost of $50,000-plus that a private school MBA costs, and a more reasonable investment that can improve your ROI picture a great deal. (Find out more about moderately-priced online MBA schools here.)

More Factors to Consider:
Will you be working while you get your MBA or become a full-time student?
If you’re working while getting your degree, such as in an online program, getting to the point where you are enjoying your ROI may take less time than it will for a full-time student who has no income while attending school. There’s no right or wrong way to get your MBA, but choosing an online option that allows you to keep working while you study can give you the option to use your salary to keep down school costs, helping you emerge from school with less debt.

Are you relying on student loans or other financing, which accumulate interest?
Obviously loans with interest mean that you’ll be paying more than the original price tag for your MBA. And the longer it takes to get your degree, the more interest you may accumulate (unless you get a government-sponsored subsidized Stafford loan, which you can put off payments on until you graduate). If you take more than the typical two years to finish an MBA, you’ll also have to wait longer for the pay increase it will hopefully bring you, adding more debt payments into your ROI calculation. Conversely, if your employer is financing some or all of your degree and guaranteeing a raise when you get your degree (not an unusual situation), your risk is much lower.

How much of your total excess income will you put towards school debt upon graduation?
It’s idealistic to think that once your salary increases, you’ll put the entire increase towards your debt (even though many internet ROI calculators make this assumption). Instead, most people increase their lifestyle with their salary. Look at your total debt and work out beforehand how much of your potential earnings increase you’ll put towards paying down your debt. Are you willing to keep your lifestyle simpler and pay down the debt faster, or would you rather make modest increases to your current living and take a little more time to pay off the debt? It’s important to think this through before you start so that you can maximize the financial value of an MBA when you graduate.

Is an MBA Worth the Investment?
Some careers, such as those in finance or executive marketing, most often require an MBA to move up the corporate ladder. However, you may be surprised to know that most jobs in business rely much more heavily on experience than a specific advanced degree. In fact, several studies have come out in recent years that show only 1 in 3 CEOs has an MBA (it also showed, amazingly, that the companies run by non MBAs tend to have better performing stocks!). This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get your MBA, but you should have solid experience first. Combining your degree with related experience is what will give you an edge over other applicants in your chosen career.

If you have a specific career goal, experience in that career, and an MBA that has given you knowledge to move forward, it can be a good investment at any age. But if you’re getting an MBA because you think it may help you, are uncertain about your future career goals, or think that getting this degree will take you out of unemployment, you might want to think again, especially if you’re well into your 30s. You need have at least a fairly good idea of which career path you want to follow for a MBA to offer you the chance of a real salary increase that will allow you to pay down your debt.

An MBA can be very helpful if you obtain and use it wisely. But getting an MBA without doing the research first could end up costing you much more that you ever bargained for.

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Hospitals and other medical facilities have evolved into very complex enterprises that have to make million dollar budget decisions on a regular basis. Nowadays they generally want business managers with specialized knowledge of the health care system to be in charge of everything from staff budgeting and insurance payment management to making decisions about whether or not a new diagnostic machine should be purchased for a particular department.

Demand for specialists with an MBA in Healthcare Management is likely to grow as new government programs, medical treatments and legal issues continue to emerge at a rapid pace, and as the U.S. population ages and demands more and more medical care. Many business managers already established in hospitals, in fact, are finding that their employers want them to go back to school for a health management MBA if they don’t already have one.

Medical Strategy & Finance
Some of the key topics you will be trained in with this type of MBA program include health law and ethics and a variety of organizational subjects like health care strategies, worldwide health systems and hospital financing. The goal is to gain a broad understanding of how to manage the interplay between medical care and finance, and to be deal with the relationships between all the key players in the hospital environment. It’s important to be able to work with patients, doctors, nurses, maintenance staff and the wide variety of social workers and other allied health practitioners who are involved in patient care today. Leadership, communication skills, dispute mediation and technology assessment are all important skills for a medical business director.

Job Functions & Salaries
Large hospitals tend to hire MBA healthcare management graduates to work in a central business office, where there’s little direct contact with patients. Becoming a business manager in a smaller hospital, health clinic or even a large medical office could give you more direct involvement in the issues that arise between doctors and patients. It’s a career specialty where you can earn anywhere from $50,000. per year to over $130,000., with a possibility of an even higher salary if you become one of the top two or three business managers of a very large hospital (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Some examples of job listings for someone with an MBA specialized in health care management:

• “Director of health economics” at a hospital. Functions include doing regular in-depth analysis on the trends emerging at the hospital in medical costs, utilization of equipment and other resources, management of finances by various initiatives and working on the pricing of products for Medicare and other health insurers.
• “Health data analyst” for a health insurer. Collecting and analyzing data that can be used by senior officers to make business decisions on how effectively costs and quality of care is being managed in the insurer’s network of customers. This is an associate-level position for someone who is relatively new to the industry.
• “Director of health and wellness” for a medical insurance company. The job involves choosing and managing relationships with external vendors who are brought in to promote the company’s services. Oversight of the delivery of tools like cost calculators, quality comparison tools and secure messaging to end-users, and managing relationships among employees, regulators and accreditation agencies.
• “Chief operating officer” for two hospitals owned by the same company. Position requires someone who can enable both hospitals to reach certain financial objectives by seeing to it that all departments achieve their individual goals. Involves analyzing the performance of patient rehabilitation centers, laboratories, diagnostic sections and even construction management. This is a very senior position that would require a good deal of experience.

Next: MBA in Project Management