Beyond the traditional student lifecycle
Although standard education programs accounted for the lion’s share of the school’s operations, students also engaged with HEC Montréal in other important ways. These included special education programs as well as EDUlib, the school’s online learning platform.
Special education programs at HEC Montréal
Although most programs offered by the school were governed by Quebec’s funding policy, HEC Montréal also offered private programs that were not subject to this policy. This gave the school more freedom with regard to the number and structure of special programs as well as tuition fees. In 2013, HEC Montréal offered two such programs.
The Executive MBA
The Executive MBA (EMBA) targeted executives looking to acquire specialized skill sets in a dedicated environment fostering both learning and networking opportunities with fellow students. The EMBA program was highly exclusive, and each cohort had at most fifty students. For these reasons, the EMBA program relied heavily on a personalized approach to communications between the school and those students. For example, EMBA applications were not shared with the rest of the school. Rather, they were evaluated by a small committee composed of staff working in the EMBA office. Similarly, contact information and other student-related data were maintained exclusively by the EMBA staff and were not shared with the rest of the school.
For the previous ten years, the EMBA program had relied primarily on its staff’s interpersonal skills to build and maintain relationships with professionals. They were the ones who often convinced executives of the benefits of pursuing an EMBA. For Michel Filion, EMBA’s recruitment director, this personalized approach fit with the program’s exclusivity, although it meant that recruitment costs could be higher than for other programs. This situation was not without risks, moreover, since it relied heavily on the work of a few individuals. Information related to the recruitment process for the EMBA program was managed primarily by a single person who used their own information storage tools, including an address book on their phone. For the EMBA staff, this was one way they sought to maintain control over their data and ensure the trust placed in HEC Montréal by executives was not violated. Indeed, the staff worried that having this information centralized and potentially shared with other services could betray that trust if busy executives were contacted for non-vital reasons, for example.