Designed with the working professional in mind, the Career Advance MBA Pathway gives you the freedom to learn from anywhere and 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 Faculty of Management’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.
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 3.5 days at the end of each term in locations such as Halifax, Toronto, Calgary, or Vancouver. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Management 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.
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.
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.
Quantitative Decision Making
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.
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.
As a student in the Career Advance Pathway, intensives were always my favourite. During this time, the course material came together so perfectly, and I had the opportunity to work with the best bunch of people in the program. For those who I did not work with, I am sure you would challenge me on this because you would say the same about your groups. That is just the nature of the program. You are bound to be inspired by such amazing peers, staff, and faculty.”
Denise Hinds (MBA ’20)
Electives: In 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.
