Competence-Based Management Awards in Higher Education?

This paper reports on a project set up to assess the feasibility of introducing a competence-based management award in a university business school. The school has a long-established Executive MBA programme-could it be adapted to use the potential benefits of competence-based development and what issues would need to be dealt with? To find out, we worked with an advisory group of major employers, and designed and ran a pilot competence-based Certificate equivalent to Year 1 of the 3-year part-time MBA programme. The lessons of this pilot, and the evidence arising from our work with members of the advisory group, are set out in this paper. They indicate that linking workbased learning with a recognized qualification is more difficult and costly than expected, and the paper shows how we now plan to overcome those difficulties.