O CEO da Catho Online, Adriano Arruda, participou de outra matéria no Financial Times. Desta vez, o executivo falou sobre a qualidade da educação executiva em São Paulo.

Business education: Well-schooled executives have wide choice of establishments

São Paulo business executives are impeccably mannered, immaculately dressed and well-educated – especially if they graduated from the right business school.

“The level of executive education here in São Paulo is great,” says Denyse Godoy, an economics journalist for Folha de S Paulo, Brazil’s biggest newspaper. “The style of business administration in Brazil is changing. Business schools get a lot of foreign students.”

Just be careful that the prestigious business school diploma is not just for show. “There are people who study at a top school merely to clean up their CV. They do a rubbish degree, then do a first-line post-grad to look good in the job market.”

While the city has a poor standard of public schooling, it is big and powerful enough to attract an accomplished, well-educated executive talent pool, says Adriano Arruda, the chief executive of online job site Catho (200,000 monthly vacancies and 140,000 companies on the site).

“São Paulo is basically a country apart, because of the quantity of qualified staff,” he says. “It has the biggest companies, the main international companies. The biggest opportunities are in São Paulo, so the majority of professionals come here.”

It also has Brazil’s best executive education. “The principal business schools of the country are in São Paulo,” explains Heitor Coutinho, who teaches strategy, project management and information technology management at the Fundação Dom Cabral (Dom Cabral Foundation).

Although based some distance away near Belo Horizonte in the neighbouring state of Minas Gerais, Dom Cabral does 46 per cent of its business in São Paulo, running customised courses for national and international corporations. “We are talking about customised programmes to attend the specific needs of an organisation,” says Mr Coutinho.

Clients have included DHL, Ambev and Itaú-Unibanco. “We consider all the aspects of the organisation. What is the culture, what is the level of education? What are the competencies, the strategies? We go to the bottom of the organisation’s development.”

The Foundation is participating in Goldman Sachs’ international 10,000 Women project – aimed at putting more women into business management through better education.

“In the next five years, we will train 500 Brazilian women,” says Mr Coutinho. In 2008, 16,000 executives enrolled at Dom Cabral.

Professor Paulo Lemos runs one of São Paulo’s most prestigious Executive MBA courses at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (Getulio Vargas Foundation), a private institution that is also one of Brazil’s leading research foundations. The course takes two nights a week for 18 months and costs R$26,000 ($15,000, £9,000).

“You should take this course when you are in mid-career. You don’t have to leave your job. It will accelerate your career and concentrate knowledge in your job area,” he says.

Professor Lemos took his PhD at Stamford and understands the value of foreign study: his students are offered a week abroad at the end of each course. “This is for people to understand a little more of the reality.”

The Foundation also participates in the One MBA programme with universities in China, Mexico and other countries. This involves students spending time at each of the other universities involved.

The Fundação Instituto de Administração (Foundation Institute of Administration, or FIA) is linked to the University of São Paulo.

Its unique selling point, says Celso Grise, its director of marketing and institutional relations, is a combination of research and close links with private and public companies.

“We have a strong practical application of our research and our knowledge,” he says.

Mr Grise warns against São Paulo’s plethora of cheaper, inferior business schools. “These are schools that teach administration, but which don’t have teachers with great professional experience. Their teachers don’t have doctorates.”

It is an opinion echoed by Luca Borroni, director of executive education at Insper (Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa, or the Institute of Study and Research). “We have a few, very good schools. But the big problem is we also have a lot of bad schools.”

Insper, a non-profit organisation launched in São Paulo in 1987, has become a reference point for high-quality business education, says Denyse Godoy. “They are choosy about students and teachers,” she says.

Companies using its courses include IBM, DuPont, Toyota and PepsiCo and its structure was inspired by its close relationship with Harvard, says Mr Borroni. It also offers courses in English and Spanish, MBAs and tailored programmes.

“Executives are typically from middle to higher management. We even design programmes for top management, including the president of an organisation,” says Mr Borroni.

São Paulo also offers more technical education – for instance the specialised knowledge that can be found in Piracicaba, in the interior of São Paulo state, at the Luiz de Queiroz Escola Superior de Agricultura (Superior Agriculture School).

But at the finest business schools, careful vetting is still required.

“Even in the good schools, you have good courses and some that are rubbish. You have to look really carefully at the curriculum and who is going to run the class,” says Insper’s Mr Borroni.

“The market still needs to become more professional.”

Leia a matéria no site do Financial Times clicando aqui.