Posted by shwekywet@gmail.com on 10/09/13 4:52am

• Posted by Thomas Graf on 10/09/13 1:46pm

  Hi there,

  thank you for your question. I consider his a very interesting topic. In fact, there is not much known - to my best knowledge - about career impacts of professional doctorates in management. The only statistics that I do know include for non-professionals as well - and because of that are not of great help.

  We will, however, conduct a global survey on DBA programs soon and expect the results to become published in spring 2014. Here we include a question on the career impact of an DBA.

  What we can do in the meantime, however, is reflecting a bit on what "success" of a DBA program would actually mean - and this may strongly depend on the motivation why someone decided to do that.

  In contrast to the MBA, people do DBA programs not only for a higher salary but also because of their academic interest their ambition to teach at a university or publish in academic or managers' journals, or even to become an affiliated professor. "Success", hence, can mean that the DBA allows you to achieve a position - for example, as an affiliated professor - at one of your target universities.

  Others may do the DBA to increase the likelihood that they become promoted internally. The degree as well as the effort invested in generating applicable knowledge for the student's employer (by writing a thesis about a business case that provides valuable insights for the DBA student's employer, for example) may be seen as very positive by his or her boss and in fact push his or her career. We do not have statistics here yet.

  Finally, a DBA may also increase your career options outside the employer - by increasing the chances of achieving a management position at a new employer.

  Even though our knowledge on the career impact of professional doctorates in management is still pretty vague, however, one notion seems to be clear: Doing a DBA - and I am talking about a serious DBA, meaning a program where the students conducts serious and high level research (as opposed to a degree mill) - "just" to increase the salary would not be the best motivation since the program takes a long time and the resources invested are huge. In this case, I would rather recommend doing an executive education seminar in some management area where the person needs knowledge and contacts.

  As for our survey, we will publish it here and inform about it in our newsletter and our facebook page.

  Best wishes,
  Thomas

  By Thomas Graf
  Founder DBA Compass
  Author of the DBA Survey

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