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What is the first thought that comes to your mind when you hear about Part-time MBA Courses? Or shall I say, do you know about part-time MBA? Is it some kind of correspondence course? Is it useful? Oh, there is no ROI in part-time courses... Most of the working executives face such questions.

In this article, I would be addressing some of these doubts.

The objective of these courses is 'two-way' learning. Now you would wonder what is two-way learning. Management education in India has been heavily bent towards full-time MBA. The creamy layer of full-time MBAs become heroes in media. Media seems to neglect that fact that the highest salary getter always have very strong experience. Most of the full-timers join to earn money, and it becomes more relevant when the percentage of joiners are freshers having no work experience or relatively negligible work experience. So learning is generally missing in such classes.

Two way leaning is for the students and teachers. Part-time students learn new concepts which can be validated in real context immediately in their respective firms. And teachers get valuable knowledge about the validity of their theories from part-time students' experiences. That's like a win-win situation for any B-school and for the students. And this is the reason why most of the reputed institutes are going for part-time / executive courses. Not to mention that the institute gets good industry interface and part-time students becomes brand ambassadors for these institutes.

No wonder, why such courses are very popular in developed countries.

Now that the objective is clear, we need to know in what way part-time courses are different from other courses. Part-time courses have same level of teaching as in full-time courses but stretched over three years. Yes, your read it right. The contents of part-time and full-time courses are entirely same. However, the disadvantage with full-time courses is that the stress is on grades and not learning as it pays them finally. Executive courses are more focused on a particular functional area.

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* Contributed by -
Nitin Jain,
Working as System Analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland, Gurgaon Branch,
Pursuing Part-time MBA Course from DoMS-IIT Delhi.