Corporate Sponsorship

Your company does not need to be sponsoring your degree financially," but Thunderbird requires all participants to have their employer approve, in advance, the necessary leave time in order to pursue the cohort’s modular series.

So the minimal support required of your company’s management is their commitment to provide you with this flexibility. Many participants’ companies allow them to use a combination of vacation and paid training time for pursuing the degree.

Corporations and employers often offer some combination of training or tuition assistance benefits for MBA programs in support of talent development. In the current Europe cohort, less than one in four of our participants had full company sponsorship for tuition. But many are self-funding a significant portion or all of the tuition & costs.

The following points may help you frame your discussion with your supervisor or employer’s HR department, should you be seeking financial support for the EMBA program.

The Executive MBA benefits your employer directly with:

Improved performance.

The EMBA will give you new skills, time away from work to consider the implications of various theories and trends on your industry and company. You will be introduced to best practices and concepts which you can implement immediately following each module in the EMBA.

Strategic recommendations.

You or your firm may be faced with a particular business case that you can use as you pursue your course work in applying theories and concepts. During the EMBA, you will have opportunities to present business scenarios to peers and professors for consideration and feedback, whether for formal course assignments or informal discussions outside of the classroom.

Confidence in your decision-making.

One of the benefits of the EMBA experience will be your confidence in the decisions that you make as a manager and in your company’s confidence in you as a leader. You will be better equipped for financial, strategic, market and human capital decisions in a range of areas, resource allocation to organizational communication. And they can be confident that you have had training from some of the most elite professors in these disciplines.

Outsourced leadership training and development.

Has your employer identified you as a potential senior manager or rising leader within the organization? What formal succession planning and training will be provided to ensure that you are ready for the highest levels of the organization? The EMBA provides your employer with an unparalleled level of training and exposure for you that could not be replicated by a corporate university or series of in-house training programs.

Access to Executive trainers.

Thunderbird’s Executive Education division, with the same dynamic professors as the EMBA, is consistently among top providers of Executive training in the rankings, including Top 10 in Course Design and Faculty Diversity in the Financial Times. The professors you will meet in the EMBA have consulted for top players in major industries, from Pharmaceutical companies to the Oil & Gas sector. This provides a quality assurance measure for the direct, practical and applicable learning to which you will be exposed during your degree program.