Why executive education is booming in Saudi Arabia

The Spanish business school Iese has benefited from rising student interest in its executive education courses from many parts of the world in recent years, but one region has stood out for the scale and growth of demand.

“Twenty per cent of our participants are from the Middle East and 80 per cent of those are from Saudi Arabia,” says Andrea Montalvo, Iese’s associate dean for executive education. “We believe Saudi will become a global player. They are building a diversified economy and have to prepare for a lot of changes. They know talent development is critical.”

Her school is not alone. While multiple foreign universities and business schools have established programmes and partnerships in the United Arab Emirates in the past few years, Saudi Arabia is increasingly becoming the focus.

The country is viewed by many in business education as a high priority location to recruit executives to train abroad on open-enrolment and custom programmes, and also to offer training and employee development domestically. A number are exploring establishing offices, campuses and joint programmes with institutions inside the kingdom.

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Babson College, near Boston, was a pioneer, collaborating with the MISK Foundation, King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) and Lockheed Martin to launch a college of business and entrepreneurship in KAEC, Saudi Arabia in 2016. It has worked with Prince Mohammed bin Salman College of Business & Entrepreneurship, which now offers its own MBA degrees.

Sergei Guriev, dean of London Business School, recently announced plans to open an office in Riyadh, expanding from the Dubai campus LBS established in 2007. It has named Florin Vasvari as executive dean of executive education, Middle East.

LBS counts Saudi Aramco, the Public Investment Fund and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation among its clients for custom education, and aims to reach more than 10,000 Saudi executives with its programmes by 2030.

“The high income Gulf countries are growing fast and investing,” says Guriev. “There is a growing economy, a growing population and a rather limited supply of world class business education.”

He stressed that there was strong demand for in-country training, partly reflecting the lower costs.

IE in Spain is another school planning to open an office in Riyadh later this year. “It is becoming probably the fastest growing region in the world for executive education,” says Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño, the university’s president. “Everyone is running programmes there, although the information is not shared or easily monitored.”

While other emerging markets offer scope for expansion, they also have greater limitations. In India, for example, international business schools need to balance the high costs of expatriate faculty against an expectation of modest pricing for local students, while competing with domestic rivals such as the Indian Institutes of Management, the highly competitive elite state-funded business schools.

By contrast, Iñiguez de Onzoño says: “In Saudi, many of the institutions are in an emerging phase. There are still opportunities for alliances and joint programmes. There is demand from leading corporations like Saudi Telecom and Aramco. And government agencies are investing heavily, with a clear vision of transforming the country.”

Saudi executives point to a significant change since 2016, when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler, launched his “Vision 2030” drive to modernise the kingdom, with fresh emphasis on hiring, development and performance reviews for government officials. That expanded interest in executive training from public sector organisations alongside those from larger private companies.

While many of the larger companies continue to send executives to business schools abroad to take advantage of the networking and global diversity of a range of participants from around the world, there is growing appetite for training within Saudi Arabia. One executive says Spanish business schools have been particularly competitive on pricing.

Guriev at the LBS says that the topics sought by Saudi clients are in line with those globally. “The whole world wants to learn about digital transformation, innovation, agile organisations and strategy,” he says.

However, some executive education providers have also focused on more specialised niches. Despite the US pushback on environmental, social and governance topics, for instance, Oxford university’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment said it has observed a notable increase in demand for its bespoke programmes for high-level Saudi executives.

While in the past the focus was primarily on net zero and the energy transition, it has shifted to topics such as carbon capture, storage and usage, resilience to extreme heat and sustainable cooling.

More broadly, it sees demand linked to recognition of the urgency of climate adaptation strategies in the region, with its foundational course on net zero made mandatory for all 65,000 public servants in the UAE.