Undress4Success - Work From Home

As telecommuting and work at home jobs become more and more popular, the same enabling technology (computers and broadband telecommunications) makes taking education and training courses from home possible too.

Studies show that e-learning in a corporate setting produces a sixty percent faster learning curve than traditional instruction. IBM’s Basic Blue e-learning initiative is reputed to have produced a 2000x return on investment. Union Pacific Railroad was able to implement new processes twelve months quicker than with traditional training.

The Florida Virtual School, founded in 1997, was the first state-led program to be funded with per-pupil public education funding. More than sixty-eight thousand students were enrolled in the 2008 academic year, taught by 440 full-time teachers and 110 adjuncts.  Students determine what month of the year they want to start, what time of day and where they want to study. They can even choose how they respond to assignments—a PowerPoint presentation, a podcast, a traditional essay, or by creating a Web site. Two-thirds of American graduate schools now offer fully online programs

Almost eighty percent of corporate managers rated online university learning as good as traditional programs, up from less than fifty percent a decade earlier. But how good the courses are is not consistent across the board.

In a prior incarnation we ran a flying service. One of our flyers was a Marine F/A-18 fighter pilot who loved flying vintage airplanes too, but he left our area to go to Navy Test Pilot School (TPS). During two tours over Iraq flying from aircraft carriers he took online courses from the University of Alabama, and received a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering. He recently took a course from TUI University and earned an MBA too.

He was kind enough to share some thoughts with us about distance learning:

“For someone trying to decide what distance school program to choose (especially graduate degrees), my strongest recommendation would be to make sure to understand specifically what the desired result of the degree is before shopping for a school or curriculum.  I’m sure that seems obvious, but I suspect many people pick a graduate curriculum without thinking it completely through. If your goals don’t require an MBA from Stanford, then why pay the money and go through the pain required to get that diploma?

My MSAE was really painful (took 7 years), and there’s no way I would have finished it if I didn’t want to do it for TPS.  It was academically robust [Ed—that’s test pilot talk for very difficult], and I consider it a pretty decent accomplishment.  If I’m ever hiring people with technical graduate degrees, I’ll treat distance engineering masters as such.

Conversely, the MBA was more of a “target of opportunity”, because I had to take a couple of graduate business courses for my career path anyway, and that combined with transfer credits from Command and Staff College had me nearly halfway there.

I now consider that whole thing nearly a waste of time.  All nine courses were essentially the same thing: write papers on an opinion you have, and support your opinion with information pulled from the reference material.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t we learn to do that in 9th grade english?  Fortunately for me, all I wanted was my military record to show that I have both a technical masters and a business degree.  It now shows that, but I really didn’t learn much of anything from the MBA. Different from the distance engineering masters, I would be wary of anyone pitching their superior management skills based on an online MBA.

I think if I were recommending how to research MBAs (or really any graduate degree) for people who work from home, I would try to find a curriculum that gives you a skill set that fits your needs very specifically.  For example, Johns Hopkins offers a Systems Engineering Masters that centers around military and even specifically Naval service systems acquisition.  It may not necessarily help out any more than other Masters degrees on paper for things like promotion (because the people doing the promoting may not know the specifics of that curriculum), but it should actually help you do your job better.

If you can’t find a curriculum specific to your line of work, which may more often be the case for most people who “undress for success”, it would probably be useful to choose a curriculum familiar to whomever you’re trying to impress.  For example, the University of Dallas has an MBA program that has a good reputation at Lockheed, so that might carry more weight than an MBA from some other small school regardless of whether it is actually more robust.  People who work from home might choose a well known school so the greatest number of potential clients recognize the degree as credible.