Value of an EMTM Degree: Worth the Investment?

“How useful is an EMTM degree to what you do?” Vladislav Vilensky asked every EMTM student he met last year when he was deciding whether to enroll in the program. It was a great question given the deteriorating economy and the practical concerns of prospective students and their employers who often underwrite or fully sponsor their participation in EMTM.

“Everyone told me the same thing: it’s useful immediately. At the time, I wondered if their response was a marketing ploy. Now that I have started the program, I realize this assessment is right on the money,” says Vilensky EMTM‘10, a senior manager of business consulting for Cognizant’s Healthcare division who commutes to the program from California. “EMTM is a gold mine of information and experience that’s absolutely worth my investment of time, money and energy. I can apply what I learn immediately; and my value to my company is increasing rapidly.”

Jason Albert EMTM‘09, a technical consultant with SAP Americas Inc. in Newtown Square, PA., concurs. “Every course I’ve taken in EMTM has correlated one-to-one with one of my workplace challenges,” says Albert. “The value I’ve been able to contribute to the business as a result of EMTM has already far exceeded my company’s investment in my education.”

Likewise, Jonathan Williams EMTM‘09, director of solutions development at RR Donnelly in Chicago, says. “I have used a piece of every course I’ve taken to date at work.” Williams entered EMTM four years after he completed an MBA and commutes to the program from Chicago. Both degrees were fully sponsored by his employer. “They saw how I was applying what I learned when I got my MBA, and thought they would get the same kind of return through EMTM,” says Williams. “With EMTM, it’s as if I have become multi-lingual in the many areas of expertise within our company. People take me more seriously when I speak in their language, and my broader skill set has improved my credibility within the organization.”

Tools for Real World Challenges
Williams’ role is to bridge departments within his firm — such as Operations, Sales, Marketing, Finance and IT — to drive new division-specific and corporate-wide initiatives from concept through launch. He readily correlates EMTM courses with workplace benefits. “Using concepts from a Marketing class, I was able to price a service that’s currently not out there in the market and feel comfortable with decisions we were making. An Operations Management class framed activity process queue times with techniques that I use all the time to define work flows within our operations. And a Decision Models class enabled me to simulate conditions of uncertainty in our financial models.”

For Amanda Lowe, EMTM‘09, “There has never been a question about the value of this investment of my money and time.” In 2007, when she moved to Philadelphia from San Francisco to begin EMTM, Lowe had shifted from a staff position with Adobe into a consulting arrangement. Within a year, Adobe recruited her back as a marketing manager, and began paying a portion of her tuition costs.

“As my skills were built out through EMTM, Adobe was able to see it was worth investing in me even though I was living in Philadelphia,” she says. “As a result of EMTM, I have become so much more organized. You can give me a lot more work now, and I can still get it done in the same time period.”

Lowe was surprised by the value she obtained from an EMTM Marketing course, since this was her preexisting area of expertise. “I learned a more quantitative, analytic approach to assessing the needs of the software development community and tracking the success of a product launch,” she says. “Now I can take a reading from a broader swathe of customers, put numbers to their feedback, and come up with a less biased view of the software developer community’s needs. This feedback loop helps us focus our product development and target our marketing message more effectively.”

The skill set gained in EMTM recently helped Jason Albert evaluate solutions for scaling up an SAP acquisition. “I tied call queuing theory (learned from Operations Management) into a statistical spreadsheet model (learned from Decision Models) to output expected telecommunication, system, and cost requirements under various utilization,” he says. “I also tied the idea of ‘real options thinking’ into avoiding the cost of a large up-front investment, and instead structuring the solution into smaller investments that could be scaled up as needed or redeployed if our initial investment didn’t attract the required threshold of new customers.”

Albert, who was recently selected to participate in a four-member work team to align SAP’s managed services globally, says, “I apply my education all the time as I identify how to scale up novel concepts to a global scale, how to finance those decisions, supply those decisions, and communicate those decisions so that my colleagues and subordinates within the organization support my recommendations. EMTM has expanded my horizons from a highly technical network engineer into someone who can take my organization to the next level. The leadership skills, communication skills, technical skills and business skills I have gained are all playing a major part in my career momentum.”

Vilensky of Cognizant, who has worked as a consultant for 17 years, finds himself strategically deploying insights gained in EMTM for client development. “The tools and insights around prioritization and optimization of investment dollars that I learned in a Decision Models course got us in the door of a client we had been pursuing unsuccessfully for eight years,” he says. “The only difference is that this time I crafted the Request for Proposal response with the knowledge that I have from EMTM. Our project is under consideration at this point. We’re in the final list as opposed to never having made it this far.”

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