So there I am on some random flight on the way to London pondering my future and flicking through some information about MBAs. So many decisions to make:  where; full time or part time; cost (ouch! must discuss with CIMA’s Education Director to fund it…) then I get to an article ‘Are Business Schools to blame for the crisis?’ http://www.newsweek.com/id/209960

The Newsweek article discusses whether business school programs ‘impart plenty of moneymaking know-how but little sense of ethics, thus producing amoral guns-for-hire.’

It refers to the chiefs from Merrill Lynch, the SEC and US Treasury Secretary with their ivy league MBAs all participating in one way or another in last year’s financial catastrophe -  could these education establishments really be ‘embedding potentially lethal analytical Trojan horses into our economies and markets’?

As you can imagine this piece had a devastating effect and I quickly changed my mind, recycled all the MBA brochures and immediately registered to do the CIMA qualification…. I exaggerate, but it did bring into focus some of the recent trends from the CIMA report Finance Transformation: The evolution to value creation (www.cimaglobal.com/financetransformation .

In this unique project CIMA had over 4500 consultations with finance and senior management professionals, worldwide, to unearth the state of finance and its likely trajectory. The report has a wealth of trends and information, and one interesting area shed new light on an organisation’s preference when recruiting finance professionals.

Personal characteristics came top of the list as one might expect, however post graduate business qualifications, such as MBAs, were the least preferred. To add to this, professional finance qualifications came top as the most preferred qualifications when recruiting for finance.

Now, the research also points to a need first and foremost to have the right technical skills in finance, and this in part explains why professional education is so in demand. But, many commentators also emphasised the need for finance to remain independent, ‘to be the guardians’ of the business.

Could these be linked?

Typically professional qualifications, such as CIMA's, have ethics embedded in their syllabus and codes that members sign up to year after year. So are we really producing amoral guns-for-hire? This doesn’t ring true, but it is interesting that whilst clearly business schools are not to blame for the financial crisis, many are now introducing pledges mirroring the Hippocratic Oath to which students promise to act ethically and do no harm.

I’m keen to delve further into the new research from the CIMA Centre of Excellence as it explores these types of dilemmas. Perhaps one day soon it will help me determine what qualification to do!