Where to do Your Online Distance MBA

How can you ensure your distance learning program is from a top business school? Ross Geraghty finds out.

It is essential with any top business school MBA course that the candidate finds the best "fit" for them. This involves spending a lot of time and effort considering the study options available. After all, an MBA program is expensive, time consuming and requires a considerable amount of effort to graduate from. This is even more important when considering the many distance learning MBAs on offer.

Finding a top business school with a decent reputation is going to be a lot more impressive to employers, due to the numerous run-of-the-mill "buy an MBA" institutions that have emerged in recent years. School reputation is still one of the most important factors MBA candidates have to consider, and it's doubly important when you consider that employers are doing exactly the same. If a DL MBA is your choice, try and get a place at the most reputable school that you are eligible for. Make absolutely sure of the accreditation that school has. Talk to alumni and other business schools to try and get a handle on the place that you're applying to. Try and talk to recruiters if possible to see what their opinions are on the school you're thinking about applying too.

QS TopMBA Scorecard is the first step for thousands of MBA candidates every year. It's an innovative online tool that allows MBA candidates to conduct a personalized search of business schools all around the world according to their own criteria. It also contains hundreds of distance learning courses and all of them are accredited courses. This is not to say that all other courses are not accredited but it is a seal of approval nevertheless.

There are several ways of narrowing down a search using Scorecard including return on investment, school specializations, strength of faculty and so on. As it's free and can be used as many times as the candidate chooses, it will provide a shortlist of business schools which will contain some names the candidate may not have considered, and some names that will keep popping up again and again. This can then be followed up by visiting that school's website and coming to visit a selection of the world's top business schools at the QS World MBA Tour, which visits over 65 cities around the world.

To be effective, Scorecard requires a little personal data to be input in order to get the best results. Paul Jones (a fictional MBA candidate) is 28 years old. He has five years of work experience in finance and wants to do an MBA in order to get ahead in his career, or perhaps move into marketing. He's considering doing an MBA but has a young family and doesn't want to commit to a full-time position. He'd also like to stay at the company he's in and continue working while studying. The first search he does on Scorecard is distance learning MBAs by marketing specialization.

The top five business schools are: 1) IE Business School (Spain) 2) Warwick Business School (UK) 3) Manchester Business School (UK) 4) Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) 5) Thunderbird School of Global Management (USA) Noting those down he decides to have another go, this time selecting finance as the most important criteria. 1) IE Business School (Spain) 2) Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) 3) Tanaka Business School, Imperial College, London (UK) 4) Manchester Business School (UK) 5) S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University (USA) Having noted these down as well, and noticing that there is a fair amount of crossover between the schools in both lists, he decides on another approach. This time he's going to take a look at program strength.

The first slider that he prioritizes highlights school reputation with recruiters and he gets: 1) IE Business School (Spain) 2) Thunderbird School of Management (UK) 3) Manchester Business School (UK) 4) S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University (USA) 5) Warwick Business School (UK) Lastly he decides that a school's career placement record could be of importance to him, so he prioritizes this highly. This time he gets the following results: 1) University of Surrey School of Management (UK) 2) Centre for Innovative Management, Athabasca University (USA) 3) Tepper School of Management, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) 4) 4) S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University (USA) 5) Manchester Business School As the world's only personalized business school ranking system, Scorecard now has over 160,000 registered users spending 6.5 minutes using the system, according to Google Analytics. There are over 350 of the world's top business schools on the system and categories for people with all sorts of experience, salaries and expectation.

Meanwhile, Paul Jones, armed with all of his Scorecard information, goes about searching long and hard for information about the schools he's shortlisted, to see which will suit his personality, and wallet, the best.