Abstract:

The university-based executive education program is a larger trend since it enhances professional management for executives among linkage of academic disciplines and real world. Programs today are more innovative, learner centered and customized to company needs. University-based business school on executive education of elite university is a popular program for executives, business leaders around the world. It also presents firm-business school partnerships. Nowadays, the higher education course is new challenges for extending to targeting on executives in South East Asia. The challenges indicate that the programs curriculum is really suitable for top executives as non-English native speaker in Thailand. Remarkably, a limited academic research has been devoted to systematically exploring the attendee’s perception of the executive education program from South East Asia. Clearly, the executive education programs arrange based on US business school location are quite successful whether the program will be success in South East Asia, especially Thailand.

This study focuses on short executive education program on Advanced Management Program; such as Leadership Best Practices, Driving Digital and Social Strategy, Finance for Senior Executives, which are offered independently by several business school especially elite Business School as QS ranking such as Harvard Business School, London Business School, Cambridge Judge Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business. The research chose Thailand as a case study. Noticeably, executive education of elite university is not quite popular in Thailand yet. The possible reasons are high fee of enrolment, less attention of course topic, and non-customized such as language barrier.

The purpose of this study is to explore the perception of top management in Thailand and their interest in studying an US elite university-based executive education programs. The survey was made online to approximately 500 executives in Bangkok (Thailand) for three weeks of October in 2016. The sample is focused on Thai executives who are 31- 55 years.

This Finding presents the main reason of respondents of choosing to study Executive Education is to obtain more job-specific knowledge and skills, to be promoted/ gain more salary, to gain new perspective of environment change, and to obtain opportunity to interact with other top executive respectively. The finding is somewhat surprising that Thai executives are interesting on particular program of Leadership Best Practices, Business Management and organization, Digital Marketing, Financing for Senior Executives, and Marketing and Sales.

Keywords:

University-based Executives Education, Consumer Behavior, Business School, Thai Executives, Perception.