The Online MBA

Most small manufacturing facility managers come into the job from an engineering background. Their engineering degree served them well in providing an adequate understanding of the appropriate engineering techniques for their entry level positions. They were able to develop the people skills necessary for the first line management positions that they were promoted into early in their careers mainly by watching and learning from the line supervisors that worked for them. Plant management, however, was a completely different matter. Nothing in their college education or in their early job experience had prepared them for the business management functions of their new jobs.

Plant managers that want to succeed and excel at their new jobs, or want to continue to climb the corporate ladder, quickly learn that their educational background is insufficient. Their engineering background is still valuable, but the new position requires a whole new skill set. While returning to a conventional university to study at the school of business management is normally out of the question for someone in this position, the development of online degree programs has provided a reasonable method for people in management positions to get the appropriate business management education.

Because there is little geographical limitation when attending an online university, the new business management student can select a school with more attention than normal to the various schools of management thought that are expounded by the school. Students whose undergraduate work was in business would tend gravitate to schools with similar business management philosophies to those of professors under whom they studied. For the engineers starting out at the graduate level in business management it would be better to seek out a school that taught management theories more closely aligned with the business management team of the company where they worked. That way the inevitable clashes between theory in school and practical business concerns will be reduced.

While the whole curriculum will be of importance to the school that teaches it, the engineer going into plant management needs to pay special attention to some specific areas that will be directly applicable to the plant managers job. First and most important will be the study of time management. While important, personal time management will not be the prime focus, it will be the management of the time of all of the employees at the plant. The competing demands of production, vacation time, government mandated training, various programs mandated by upper management, and the inevitable drive to minimize overtime cry out for the use of proper time management techniques.

Project management is another area that should require special attention by the engineer moving into management. The use of project management case studies to understand the basic principals will be something very familiar to the engineering student. In fact the entire process of using management case studies has a very engineering feel to it. Looking at real life situations, base lining data, analyzing what was done and understanding how the outcome came to be are tools that were also used in undergraduate engineering schools.

Finally the management students with an engineering background should certainly avail themselves of their technical training to make the maximum use of online management tools. This background will be invaluable in learning how to use online project management software and even online document management programs. These are not much different than some of the online tools covered in undergraduate engineering courses and that previous knowledge will make understanding these tools much easier.

Engineers that complete business management programs online make themselves much more valuable to the manufacturing companies for whom they work. Their ability to cross back and forth between these two competing sides of the company management structure will ensure that they can continue to progress up the corporate ladder.