Book: Make the most of management education
Continuing education, competence development, courses and many other offers battle for Danish leaders' spare time. Supplementary training has become very popular in the corporate sector, and Danish public and private companies spend billions each year to improve the skills of their executives. But what will an experienced leader get out of a couple of hours in school? Which learning style is best, when practitioners become theorists? And how do you turn a specialist into a multidisciplinary?  

The book ”Ledelse og læring i praksis (management and learning in practice)”, edited by Poula Helth, addresses how more and better learning is created in connection with management education.

Study of CBS MPA gives positive results
One of the contributors of this book is Associate Professor and Programme Director from CBS, Dorthe Pedersen. In the book, she focuses on what managers gain from obtaining a management degree and bases it on studies of the Master of Public Administration (MPA) at CBS. And they actually show that managers have found a new calm and more strength in their role as manager, which is primarily owing to an increase of their ability to observe and to analyse management situations and scopes for action.

- It is important that the manager is able to take a helicopter view, which means that you go from thinking in narrow specialist fields to having a more holistic view on management. The studies show that managers with a degree from CBS become multi-disciplinary and better at reflecting and seeing opportunities in addition to their previous educational standards and experience, says Dorthe Pedersen.

Competence development is organisational
In order for the company and the employee to make the most out of competence development, a primary task is to integrate theory and use it in practice. The MPA programme at CBS isn't a practically oriented programme per se, but the theoretical frame of reference is still quickly transferred into practical knowledge as a consequence of deliberately working with mid-career managers, who work with conditions and challenges of their own way of practising management. The participants themselves emphasise the network including other managers and the analytical work with urgent managerial challenges as being crucial to what they gain from the programme.

- These students aren't limited by theory; they quickly turn it into new scopes for action, which often makes the case work much more dynamic. What makes it exciting to work with these managers is the fact that they already have vast experience and management practice to which they can link their theoretical considerations. And this is where work really starts to pay off, says Dorthe Pedersen.