The global business qualification

LONDON, England (CNN) -- It is fast becoming a truism of the modern MBA that for a program to be truly cutting edge it also has to be global in outlook.

Apart from the worldwide spread of top schools, many of which are now dotted around Asia, the Middle East and Africa, as well as the United States and Europe, increasing numbers of MBAs involve study across two or more campuses in different countries, often even different continents.

Well, the same is true for the Executive MBA, or EMBA -- only more so.

EMBAs are a relatively lesser known aspect of business education, but one which has mushroomed in popularity over recent years.

Aimed at experienced working managers, EMBAs are typically taken part time, saving the disruption -- and massive expense -- of having to leave the workplace for the typical two year duration of a full time MBA.

Along with the recent growth in the number of top quality EMBAs on offer has come a parallel development of ever more league tables ranking them, as with MBAs.

One of the more authoritative of these is compiled by the London-based Financial Times newspaper which has just released its 2007 rankings, which illustrate above all else the global nature of the qualification.

In the EMBA top 10 alone, schools from six countries on three continents are involved, although there is a clear bias towards major international business centers -- four of the top 10 are taught partly or wholly in London, while six of the top 21 have a foot either in or near New York.

The FT's number one-ranked EMBA is taught jointly by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and Hong Kong's University of Science and Technology.

A similarly multinational program is rated second, the Trium EMBA run by HEC in Paris, the London School of Economics and New York University's Stern School.

Also in the top 10 are some perennial US big hitters -- Wharton, Columbia, and Chicago -- as well as London Business School, Spain's Instituto de Empresa and Insead, jointly based in Spain and Singapore.

In Asia, the demand for EMBAs is particularly buoyant, with more than 700 managers enrolling on the program at the CEIBS school in Shanghai, China.

"Application to our program has been growing at a rate of more than 25% per year for the past 12 years and it is still growing," Neng Liang, the school's EMBA director, told the FT study.

Managers are also traveling far and wide to seek out the best EMBAs. At the London campus of the University of Chicago's school, 38% of students come from western Europe, 25% from eastern Europe and the rest from Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Oxford University's Saïd business school told the study that this global reach had come as a surprise -- when it launched its EMBA in 2004 it expected most students would be local.

"We got it slightly wrong," said EMBA director Stephan Chambers. "Managers on the program have come from as far afield as Tokyo, San Francisco and New York."

A second recent survey of EMBAs, issued by Business Week magazine, also shows the qualification's global spread, with the four U.S. and one Canadian school in the top 10, balanced by London Business School and two from Spain along with the Spanish-Singaporean Insead and Switzerland's IMD. E-mail to a friend