Career Advance Pathway - MBA
MBA
DURATION
7 years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Part time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
EARLIEST START DATE
STUDY FORMAT
Distance Learning, Blended
Key Summary
About: The Career Advance Pathway is a part-time, blended Master of Business Administration (MBA) designed for working professionals at Dalhousie University in Halifax. It uses blended online delivery across three academic terms. You’ll choose courses each term to balance study with work, and can finish in 2.5 to 7 years.
Career Outcomes: It develops leadership, talent management, analytical and decision-making skills, plus risk and resource management. It sharpens client relationships, trend anticipation, and offers networking. Graduates hold senior roles across private, public and non-profit sectors in Canada and abroad. Typical roles include CEOs, VPs at financial institutions, and Deputy Ministers.
Designed with the working professional in mind, the Career Advance MBA Pathway gives you the freedom to learn from anywhere, at your own pace. Our curriculum embraces your existing expertise and uses a balance of theory, analysis, and day-to-day practice to prepare you to respond strategically to complex management issues and devise innovative, relevant, and real-world solutions to your organization’s challenges.
Pathway at a Glance:
The pathway's part-time blended online delivery model ensures that you can complete your MBA degree without losing career momentum in as little as 2.5 or as many as 7 years. In each of the three academic terms, students choose from a list of wide-ranging courses balancing your learning needs with your lifestyle and professional responsibilities.
The ideal candidate for this pathway of our MBA Progrma is a mid-career working professional who wishes to advance their career. It is required that applicants have more than 5 years' relevant professional work experience.
While this program is open to both domestic and international students, it is ideal from the student experience perspective that candidates reside in Canada.
We ask that international applicants consider the following before applying to our program:
- This program is offered in a part-time Online/Blended model and is not an on-campus program.
- This includes synchronous online live classes which take place after 6:00PM AST (note: Canadian time zone applies).
- Most students reside in Canada. Group work makes up a significant part of the curriculum and deliverables and take place in the evening using Canadian time zones.
- Each course includes a mandatory in-person 2-3.5 day intensive session at the end, located in a city across Canada (Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Halifax). Booking travel, accommodations, and all associated costs are the responsibility of the student.
- All courses are not offered every term or offered in every city and often students must wait for the next term to take a course needed for the completion of their program.
- International students pay an additional fee on top of regular tuition and fees, making each course approximately $5000 CAD.
- The fee structure for this program does not provide students with full access to Dalhousie services
- Please note that this program does not qualify international students to be eligible for a Post-Graduate Work Permit and international students may not be eligible to work in Canada while taking the program.
- It is the student’s responsibility to apply for the necessary study visas and extensions etc. in a timely manner, especially before their visa expires so that they can continue in the program.
Due to the structure and design of the Career Advance MBA Pathway, there are no scholarships or funding available for applicants.
Core Curriculum
Students within this pathway develop a diverse set of fundamental business skills through our core curriculum. The Dalhousie edge is its blended online learning model which allows for the flexibility of online learning while providing the opportunity to develop rich personal connections with your classmates through face-to-face intensives.
Core Course Intensives
Students spend 2- 3.5 days at the end of each term in locations such as Halifax, Toronto, Calgary, or Vancouver in an intensive session, coming together in person with their classmates and professor. Activities and goals of intensives can vary depending on the nature of the class and instructor. They may include lectures, presentations, simulations, group activities, individual assignments, and guest speakers.
Core Courses
Quantitative Decision Making for Managers
This course will introduce students to some basic quantitative techniques used to solve business problems. The course is designed to provide an understanding of techniques that are based on statistical concepts and decision analysis. Topics include descriptive statistics, statistical sampling, statistical inference, regression modelling, linear programming, risk analysis, and decision-making with probabilities. In addition, students will learn and practice how to use Microsoft Excel to employ these techniques. Group case studies and class discussions prepare students to be real problem-solvers.
Business Microeconomics
Domestic and international markets, government policy, and central bank decisions present opportunities, challenges, and threats to the operating and competitive decisions of business owners, managers, and investors. The main objective of this course is to provide a concise treatment of the fundamentals of economics, as the study of how economic agents allocate scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants in a modern market economy such as Canada.
Accounting for Managers
This course introduces the principles and practices used to process and communicate financial information about an organization to various stakeholders. To be a competent manager, you must have some degree of accounting literacy and a critical appreciation of the subject. A portion of this course examines the challenges of financial accounting and is focused on understanding and interpreting financial statements. The other portion of the course explores the use of accounting information to assist managers with internal decision making. This is a user-oriented course that emphasizes hands-on exploration, analysis, and evaluation of accounting concepts. We will use Microsoft Excel, cases, and real financial statements during this class.
Marketing Management
Marketing Management goes beyond an Introductory marketing course and focuses on the fundamental marketing strategy concepts and frameworks. Current and relevant strategic issues in marketing will be covered. In many instances, students are asked to assume the role of a marketing manager, critically examine marketing scenarios, and suggest appropriate marketing strategies. Marketing Management provides the student with an introduction to the practical application of marketing theory and practice. Topics covered within the course include, but are not limited to, identifying target markets, building customer relationships, building strong brands, and designing and building communication and promotion strategies.
Financial Management
This course is designed to provide the student with a broad overview of the analysis, techniques and knowledge needed to perform the central tasks and make the main decisions required of a corporate financial manager. The core topics covered are Capital Analysis (what something is worth), Capital Budgeting (what investments to make), Capital Structure (how to raise the money for investment), Working Capital Management, (management of day-to-day cash flows) and Financial Risk Management, (managing uncertainty). To support and supplement the discussion of these central themes, the course will also cover Corporate Governance, Triple Bottom Line, Structure of Financial Markets, Financial Statement Analysis, Fixed Income Mathematics, Monte Carlo Simulation, and International Finance.
Mangement Skill Development
Focused primarily on skill set development, this course provides the student with an introduction to the practical application of theory in managing people for success, all within the context of the external and organizational forces that impact management. We will address specific organizational behaviour and general management knowledge requirements for today’s managers and focus on enhancing the student’s capacity for creative application of that knowledge to achieve success. In particular, the course builds the student’s qualitative managerial skills and the student’s ability to reason from both qualitative and quantitative information as a means for integrating knowledge with other MBA courses.
Operations Management
All managers should be familiar with the key concepts and techniques related to the production function of an organization regardless of their areas of responsibilities. Operations Management can broadly be defined as the design, operations, and improvement of the systems that create and deliver the firm’s primary products and services. It is therefore a discipline that is critical to the sustainability of all organizations focusing on managerial issues of the operations. The course covers the key concepts and the latest developments in the field.
Management Information Systems
In today's environment, it is essential that business managers & executives understand the basic concepts of contemporary information systems (IS), how IS are managed as well as their potential effects on organizations. To this end, this course is designed to provide MBA students with a fundamental understanding of key IT issues with the belief that these individuals will be the primary decision-makers in major IT initiatives and investments. Therefore, it is necessary to provide future managers with the basic knowledge required for effective IT-related decision-making.
International Business
This course provides a survey treatment of international businesses that will benefit all MBA students and build a foundation for those proposing future study in this area. For students not going on in the field, it provides the tools needed to manage the interdependence between domestic and international markets.
Strategic Management
This course focuses on the formulation and implementation of strategy. Specific topics include: the management of strategy and organization structure, leadership, organizational culture, and large-scale organizational change. Students are exposed to a wide variety of organizations through case discussions, a case assignment, and a final case examination. In addition, students will have the opportunity to conduct a detailed study of a partner organization through the Make a Difference (MAD) group project.
Electives
n addition to the core curriculum students in this pathway complete 9 credit hours of specialized electives. Elective classes are designed to take your knowledge to the next level. The Dalhousie MBA program currently offers electives in six specialized areas. Students may choose electives from any of the specialized areas or combine MBA electives with graduate offerings from programs within and outside of Faculty of Management.
Areas of Specialization
- Finance
- Leadership
- Entrepreneurship and Innovation
- Enterprise Analytics
- Marketing
- Strategy
Rated number #275 in the world, learn more about Dalhousie University's QS Ranking.
You can view Dalhousie's Graduate Academic Calendar for 2024-2025 which offers more course information below.
Acquire Deep and Broad Expertise
Designed for the working mid-career professional, the Career Advance MBA Pathway can equip students for advancement into more senior roles as well as help broaden curren skill sets and leadership skills to become more efficient in curernt roles.
Our course curriculum and delivery format will help you to:
- Strenghten your ability to manage and lead talent
- Refine your analytical ability
- Sharpen your judgement, particularly as it relates to effective decision making
- Best manage risk, make the most of resources, devlop strong client relationships, and anticipate trends
- Gain unique access to a netowork of working professionals across the country
As a result, our alumni are in a wide variety of senior roles leading teams in private, public, and non-profit sectors across Canda and internationally. Some of these include:
- CEOs
- VPs of major financial institutions
- Deputy Ministers in Federal Government
Our Faculty
Highly accessible, our professors are innovators and influencers in their area of expertise. They pursure groudbreaking research, and through leadership that informs what they teach, have a real impact on business in competitive industries around the globe.
Working with them means you'll leanr from industry experts who bring real work expereince to the classroom, teachnig you how to optimize performance, make sustainability profitable and manage with a global perspective.
Our faculty have written, edited, or co-edited many books, as well as innumerable chapters and articles. They've been members of and served on a diverse range of boards and assocations, while having received many teaching awards.
Explore our Faculty Profiles
The Dalhousie Community
Dalhousie is located in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Canada’s East Coast and has over 200 years of teaching excellence— celebrating it’s 200th anniversary in 2018. As one of Canada’s Research Intensive U15 Institutions the university has over $135M in research grants, 49 Canada Research Chairs, and as of December 2021, 93 Rhodes Scholars.
A large community, Dalhousie has over 20 000 students from more than 115 countries and in turn, a strong alumni network of over 150 000 graduates.
This program is delivered on a part time basis only in an online/blended format. All courses are taught online synchronously and there is a required in-person intensive component that students must attend at the end of every semester for 8 core courses..
Students must ensure they have the proper technical abilities and set up to engage in this format of learning.
All items associated with attending the mandatory in-person intensive sessions (cost, booking travel, etc.) at the end of each semester are the responsibilty of the students.
