Applied Learning

The University of South Carolina Professional MBA program at the Darla Moore School of Business focuses on providing students practitioner-based knowledge that they can immediately apply to their careers.

As students in the PMBA program also hold full-time professional positions, the goal of the program is to enable its students to become more valuable members of their organizations from day one of the program.

“The power of the Professional MBA program is in the practical knowledge that I have learned across the disciplines of business,” said Tiffany Crumpton, a current PMBA candidate. “Areas such as management, marketing, accounting, finance and quantitative methods are coupled with the learnings from the classroom and are immediately applied to my work.”

The PMBA research and clinical faculty are bright professors who are also business consultants and engaged industry professionals; this enables them to provide relevant, real-world examples of the practices they are teaching. Therefore, PMBA program students are presented information about timely topics pertinent to real-world business issues.

“I present topics like budgeting, cost-volume-profit analysis and short- and long-term decision making in my managerial accounting class,” said Robert Lipe, the faculty director of the PMBA program. “A number of students have said they took those lessons and applied them the next week at work.”

While faculty will cover some theory and conceptual learning in the classroom, Moore School PMBA students are exposed to a wide array of practical applications of their degree. Laura Cardinal, a PMBA program professor, said that these “frameworks” help students manage sustaining and disruptive innovations in their career work.

“These frameworks enable professionals working in small firms and large corporations to think strategically about anticipating shifts in their industries and creating new capabilities to better manage the life cycle of innovation in their organizations,” Cardinal said.

Thomas Victa, a product manager who is currently enrolled in the PMBA program, said that the “framework” from the PMBA program has allowed him to “look at my business through a new lens.”

“My marketing classes, particularly Professor [Mark] Newsome’s, have really helped me create a winning product strategy and connect the dots between the consumer and successful products and brands,” Victa said.

The Professional MBA program exposes business professionals to new ways of approaching their work and empowers them to utilize their knowledge to advance their organizations, industries and careers.