About the HEC Paris EMBA: Executive Management Training on Your Own Terms

The HEC Paris Executive MBA offers an unparalleled mix of world-class executive training and program flexibility. With a focus on leadership, strategy, and specialization options, participants engage in a transformative learning experience tailored to their career goals and schedules.

Sky-high barriers of entry to the very highest levels of management are daunting, even for seasoned professionals well into a successful career. The traditional fix—a full-time MBA—isn’t for everyone. Condensed executive education may seem like an obvious alternative, then, but it can fall short of the heft, depth, and polish needed to make a decisive impact. So, carefully balancing the richness and rigor of an MBA with the focus and flexibility of executive education is the solution for many.

With that in mind, the HEC Paris Executive MBA is designed to offer this balanced blend of best-in-class quality and customization. The school’s 18-month program for professionals ranks perennially among the world’s best.

The core curriculum features a heavy dose of leadership and strategy. It offers participants the chance to specialize in one of nine key areas of industry, and culminates in a comprehensive business project of executive quality.

Formats and flexibility

With four individual intakes per year, students control the course of their own 18-month learning journeys, with an array of class formats to suit stringent objectives.

Three of the program’s four intakes are organized around seven, five-to-ten-day modules every other month. Among them, the January and September intakes are held in the verdant confines of the school’s Jouy-en-Josas campus, 15 kilometers from downtown Paris. The final modular track, February, is held at HEC Paris’ facility in Doha. The fifth track, starting in March, meets for two days every other week and is based in the heart of the City of Lights.

 Throughout, the program’s language of instruction is English.

Approaching Academics

The EMBA’s innovative learning approach combines case studies, workshops, interactive role-plays, and testimonials from senior changemakers and industry experts.

Core courses focus heavily on leadership and strategy.

Key to this is reinforcing crucial fundamentals of management. Finance, marketing value creation, and strategic talent management feature heavily. Expertly paired with the fundamentals, the future-forward focus of the program’s content brings additional focus to current trends and transformation like entrepreneurship and social responsibility.

 Specializations, Personal Development, and the Final Deliverable

Nine Specializations, meanwhile, give participants a chance to delve into a chosen field in minute detail. Among them: finance, energy, luxury, innovation and entrepreneurship, startups, sustainability transformation, board governance, healthcare, and digital management.

Each Specialization offers participants novel ways of approaching each sector, along with the chance to fine-tune their knowledge by learning from thought leaders at ground zero of each field. For example, the Specialization in sustainability brings students to Manaus, Brazil. Shape the Future of Energy is split between Doha and London. Digital transformation and innovation and entrepreneurship both feature time in San Francisco and Paris.

Professional development looms large among the program’s major goals. The highly personalized effort orbits key custom projects, personalized coaching, a Leadership Development Plan for each participant, and ongoing reviews of achievements during the program.

Executives focus on inspiring diverse teams, building and maintaining trust, leading change, and effective negotiation. Each person is assigned a coach, a track advisor and support from the school’s Career Center, which applies a separately developed curriculum that caters to the unique demands of the boardroom veterans that comprise the HEC Paris EMBA.

The final deliverable of the program is the Capstone Project. Far from a mere academic flourish, it is an in-depth, 8-month project, tasking participants with applying their expertise to a complex challenge with tangible, actionable outcomes.

Many participants choose to tackle challenges they encounter at work. Others, their eye on a professional pivot, apply their unique blend of expertise and pedigree to consultative projects elsewhere. Still others take concrete steps to starting the company of their dreams.

All benefit from the counsel of a hand-selected industry expert mentor and the support of faculty members and of course their EMBA peers, often experts themselves. With the right set of circumstances, the Capstone Project can lead to even more impactful outcomes.

Recent years have seen participants use their Capstone Projects to spearhead the creation of entirely new business units at work, to launch exciting companies of their own, and to secure promotion to CEO.

Power in its people

An integral feature of the HEC Paris Executive MBA is the diversity of its cohorts—both in professional background and international makeup. The groups are in turn taught by a corps of world-class international faculty. Well over half of the program’s 30 professors come from outside France to teach a group brimming with insights and experience even before they walk through the doors at HEC Paris.

The HEC Paris EMBA program participant: a snapshot

EMBA participants at HEC Paris average in their late 30s. Many candidates are younger, but no less qualified. All have been in the workforce for 8 years, though it’s often closer to 15, and demonstrate an upwardly consequential career arc. Their years of managerial experience and international exposure mean HEC Paris EMBA classes are astoundingly diverse; the latest graduating class hailed from 50 different nationalities.

Give your career the Executive edge at HEC Paris

 HEC Paris has offered its executive management training program for some 40 years. Today, most executives see the Executive MBA as a transformational opportunity, with an eye to changing function or developing their own product and company. If you’re ready to take the next step in your EMBA journey, introduce yourself.