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12 Family Survival Tips From Henley Business School


by on 01/10/12 at 4:00 pm
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If you’re a prospective manager seeking to further your growth as a business leader, an MBA is often the obvious choice for doing this. However, when tasked with deciding on whether embarking on an MBA is worth the sacrifice, you might encounter overwhelming thoughts along the way that could leave you feeling perplexed.

MBA’s are notorious for causing disruptions to one’s lifestyle, family and work balance and these are realities that many senior executives are faced with when considering this option. Fortunately, one business school is all too familiar with the stresses that an MBA can impose and is working hard to better accommodate their students by providing more flexible study options.

Henley Business School is an education establishment that empathizes and appreciates the pressures of combining study with day-to-day life, working actively to reduce those stresses. At Henley Business School, MBA students’current lifestyle with the added responsibilities of work or family is taken into account, ensuring that a degree of flexibility is provided allowing you more room for unexpected life events.

It’s important to align yourself with a business school that respects your values from the start and appreciates your unique individual needs when it comes to furthering your personal development and growth. For this purpose, Henley Business School has compiled some useful guidelines that will steer you in the right direction when undertaking an MBA and making this a more manageable and enjoyable experience:

  1. Put aside time to meet with current and graduated students to hear their opinions and views about their MBA experience. This will also clear up any preconceived ideas or unrealistic expectations that you might have about the research that you have been doing.
  2. Confirm with your employer if they assist employees with tuition reimbursement or time-off during the programme. It’s important to understand in advance if your company is supportive of part-time education.
  3. Choose an internationally accredited school, ie: accreditation by theglobal top three accrediting bodies, the AACSB (USA), EQUIS, (EU) and AMBA (UK). These provide rigourous and independent,world-class quality audits ensuring that standards, systems, quality and ethos are sound, relieving you of unnecessary stress. Henley is the only triple accredited school in Africa, currently.
  4. Ensure that you discuss your plans with your partner as the level of satisfaction that you experience in your personal life will have a big impact on whether you successfully complete your MBA programme.
  5. Devise a personal time-table for the completion of degree requirements that allow you to plan smartly between allocating time towards family activities and towards studies.
  6. Take advantage of the infrastructure offered by your school when it comes to attending networking events with fellow students, companies and other institutions, where you can leverage the MBA programme to the fullest.
  7. Ask if your school has an active programme that includes partners and students and works with them to relieve the stress of study on families, providing guidance and advice. Henley is one of the few business schools in theworld to launch an energetic family support programme around its MBA, and it was pioneered here in South Africa – an unique offering amongst business schools.
  8. Maintain work-family-school balance. Deliberately plan to set aside quality time for your family and try to make the time you spend together special. Practically apply the lessons you’ve learnt from your MBA programme to your work environment to demonstrate the value added.
  9. Create a healthy physical routine by getting enough sleep, eating a well-balanced diet, exercising and maintaining a positive mindset. All these factors will contribute to how well you progress with your MBA programme.
  10. Ensure that you have undertaken a thorough evaluation of your financial resources that are required to complete the course.
  11. Don’t look at your marks as a personal attack on your character. Rather create an open channel of communication between yourself and your teachers. Ask for feedback if you are confused about why certain marks were allocated and be prepared to listen and seek learning in
    the feedback.
  12. Don’t give into anxiety or stress easily. Aim to stay focused and calm. Perseverance and tenacity are two important personality traits that will benefit you in the long run.

Ideate is one of South Africa's biggest business blogs, with a team of authors all of whom have had entrepreneurial experience. Ideate is read by entrepreneurs thinking BIG. Follow us on Twitter here. View more articles by Staff Reporter.

Tags: mba

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