Nigel F. Banister

'The main reason students will choose to study with us is the brand name: Manchester Business School is one of the world's top 15 business schools,' says Chief Executive Officer, Nigel F. Banister.

'For our start in Dubai we will be offering 25% scholarships to all our initial intake of students. We expect to have around 50 students for the first semester, but we hope to grow fast. We have 300 to 400 students per year in places like Singapore and Hong Kong'.

Mr. Banister says that Dubai reminds him very much of Singapore where he spent five years working earlier in his career: 'It is a vibrant economy, full of opportunities and people are attracted to this kind of environment. Just look at the new Dubai International Financial Centre, for example.

'The Manchester Business School Worldwide MBA is exactly the same qualification as students would get in the UK studying full-time, and indeed many of our distance-learning candidates do come to the UK to study for one term.

'Our MBA takes 18 months full-time, and part-time students typically take between two-and-a-half and three years to complete the course. The part-time option includes intensive workshops with visiting members of the faculty, and despite the demands of the course we have virtually no drop outs.

'We also find that employers are now displaying a more enlightened approach to MBA studies. The main benefit to the employer is that they keep the employee, and at the same time they can often immediately apply their MBA studies to their place of work; we have seen many cases of students implementing skills learned on the MBA course to the benefit of their company,' explains Mr. Banister, who was a qualified stockbroker and as managing director of fully listed NMW Computers plc earlier in his career was in the forefront of introducing electronic trading to the City.

The Manchester Business School MBA is a general management foundation, but its two-thirds of core general management options are complemented by one-third of elective options that allow the course to be tailored to suit particular job sectors. Its options for financial managers and engineers are well known, but for Dubai as its third offshore centre the school is rolling out an MBA for construction executives.

'We are actually launching this new programme worldwide in the UK and UAE first,' explains Mr. Banister. 'This is a response to the dynamism of the Dubai construction sector, and the options are specially tailored and include courses on the built environment, working collaboratively and managing a construction firm.

'Our traditional focus for overseas students has always been the Far East but we realize that with the tremendous growth in the Gulf region this is the right time to expand and benefit from the empathy with UK education and the use of English.

'There have also been significant changes at Manchester with the merger of the Manchester University and UMIST a year ago to create the first UK 'super-university' which is the biggest in terms of student numbers and research budgets. I was brought in to expand the quality, range of courses and geographical spread of the business school and my first stop is Dubai'.