New stackable MBA pathway: AMBA allows credit transfer from PG Cert

In the spirit of enhancing flexibility and stackability worldwide and creating an additional pipeline for MBA student recruiting, AMBA now permits accredited institutions to launch MBA-compatible Postgraduate Certificate (PG Cert) programmes. These are composed of up to a third of the credits of a full MBA programme and need to be designed based on courses from the school’s existing AMBA-accredited MBA programmes.

Importantly, AMBA now allows for the credits from such PG Certs to be transferred to a subsequent MBA within five years of PG Cert completion, without any limit on the number or proportion of people who can use this option.

Original AMBA standards will be upheld

The transfer of up to 33 per cent of an MBA programme’s credits is conditional on institutions strictly applying AMBA’s MBA-level standards in admission, delivery and assessment in the PG Cert. This means that only applicants with at least three years’ work experience can be enrolled on an AMBA-compliant PG Cert. Furthermore, the required mandatory and rigorous assessment distinguishes the PG Cert from most forms of executive education where there is little or no assessment.

The new AMBA policy on PG Cert credit transfer could potentially lead to additional streams of students into MBA programmes globally, given that it enables those MBA-qualified applicants not ready to commit to a full MBA to stagger their studies and stack their credits over a number of years.

Even though AMBA only accredits the full MBA degree and does not accredit the PG Cert itself, the interoperability between an AMBA-compliant PG Cert and a full MBA programme allows for courses to be delivered jointly in the same classroom to students from both groups. Alternatively, this could take place using a format of separate streams, depending on the size of the cohorts and at the discretion of the institution’s management.

When designing an AMBA-compliant PG Cert, institutions are free to choose the MBA courses that will be included in the programme. A PG Cert, therefore, can be composed of any combination of MBA core courses, MBA electives, or a mix of the two.

New policy enables students to upgrade

This new AMBA policy primarily aims to enable students to upgrade a PG Cert to a full MBA within the same institution, as the courses in the PG Cert are designed to be a subset of the MBA qualification. PG Cert graduates would be free to request a transfer of credits to another institution’s MBA, but the acceptance of such credits would be entirely up to the recipient institution, since course content and credit hours can vary. The PG Cert can also serve as an exit pathway for those who do not progress to a full MBA degree.

AMBA allows institutions the freedom to call their (one or more) AMBA-compliant PG Cert programmes by various names, eg Business Certificate, Management Certificate, Marketing Certificate, Finance Certificate, or Business Administration Certificate. However, institutions are advised not to use the name “MBA Certificate” in order to avoid confusion with the full MBA degree, as the difference between ‘certificate’, ‘diploma’ and ‘degree’ is often lost when it comes to the general market and international audiences.