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44 BCBUSINESS.CA MARCH/APRIL 2023 U niversity was a distant memory for Mal- colm McDonald when the longtime sales executive started looking at MBA schools in 2017. He left UBC with an English degree in 2001, and climbed between successive roles with different companies to become director of sales for construction heavyweight Ledcor. McDonald had loads of experience by then, but wanted a better foundation to help him keep level- ling up. "I needed to stop just randomly encoun- tering business problems and solving stuff," he remembers. He wanted to learn things in a struc- tured way, so that he would already understand new challenges by the time he faced them. McDonald didn't want to move or pause his career, which narrowed his search to part-time, Vancouver-area MBA programs. SFU's executive MBA (EMBA) quickly stood apart. It fit his work schedule, and, more importantly, its educational experience is tailored for senior managers and professionals like him. Beedie's dean, Andrew Gemino, says his school carefully selects students with more work and management experience and from a diversity of backgrounds for its EMBA program. "We're looking The Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University " We're looking at a minimum of 10 years' professional experience, but we get much more than that. Our average this year, I think, is 19 years' experience " –Andrew Gemino, dean, the Beedie School of Business at a minimum of 10 years' professional experience, but we get much more than that," he reveals. "Our average this year, I think, is 19 years' experience." Beedie offers a generalist full-time MBA and three part-time MBAs in addition to the EMBA—one generalist, one focused on technology manage- ment and one that develops Indigenous business leadership. The students in those cohorts are younger, averaging between three and 11 years of work experience. "So, the discussions you have in that EMBA classroom are very different," Gemino says. Those higher-level conversations appealed to McDonald. "I wanted a program with folks who were at a similar level in their career, or a similar stage in their lives," he explains. McDonald soon found he could take ideas from his weekend classes and put them to work on the job. "I immediately started to apply some of those learnings to what I was doing," he says. He graduated in 2020 and credits his degree for preparing him to become the COO of a young con- sulting firm last May: "I think many of the things that I was exposed to have enabled me to be a chief of operations." BORED CHAIRS SFU's part-time MBA programs are particularly attractive to executives looking to learn in a more structured way