Developing Managerial Skill Through Open Mode MBA Programme: An Approach for the School of Business, Bangladesh Open University

Abstract

PCF1 // Over the last twenty-five years after the independence, Bangladesh Economy has shifted from agrarian to more industrialized based. With the new wave of globalization, the country has adopted the open market economy as the vehicle of its economic development. The shifts in the state economy have created competitive pressures to the enterprise management. So due to the intense competition most of the organizations management emphasize on the development of management education and the need for suitable managerial skills (Putti, 1991, 8.). Among the modern management skills, the abilities to manage a change, to manage conflict and finally to apply systems approach in management are crucial. To develop these managerial skills, appropriate programmes are needed in the management education of a country. But, there has not been any marked development in the management education system in Bangladesh since independence (Razzaque, 1991.124). Management education in different conventional Universities is not sufficient to meet the growing demand of the modern management. In Bangladesh only five state universities including an institute and a few private universities have programmes in Business Administration. Moreover the programmes available in these conventional universities do not fit into the skill necessary to develop a large number of working managers of both the public and private sector enterprises of the country. The more important reason of the failure is that, this large number of working managers do not have enough time and space to attend a programme in any conventional method. Obviously, an open learning system is a must to develop the necessary professional skills of these management people. With an objective of meeting this education need, the School Of Business (SOB), Bangladesh Open University (BOU) decided to launch an MBA Program in October, 1998 which is the main context of this paper. However, the objective of this paper is to examine the open mode MBA programme of the SOB, BOU to know whether their programme can develop the managerial skill of its target group. The authors hope that this paper will provide necessary guidelines to the SOB,BOU to enrich its MBA Programme as well as another proposed MBA Programme under the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Scheme. The research is naturally a secondary data based study. The sources of data are the regulation of the MBA programme, programme brochure, printed material on other distance education programme, etc. Although, the study is secondary data based, primary data through interviewing the Dean of the School, Faculty Member, Official & working managers have been collected to fit the need of relevant information of the study. //