This year marks the publication of the ninth annual Financial Times survey of non-degree executive education programmes.

It includes three business school rankings: of schools which offer open enrolment and customised programmes and a combined table featuring schools which are ranked for both.

Open enrolment programmes are open to employees from any interested companies. The programmes included in the ranking last for at least three days. Customised programmes are tailor-made for companies that want to offer specific training or development to a group of their employees.

Fifty-two schools participated in the open enrolment stream of the survey and 67 in the customised stream. To be eligible to participate, a school must have had income of at least $2m from the relevant programme type during 2006.

The custom ranking is compiled from responses to two types of surveys; telephone interviews and an online survey of statistical data completed by each participating business school.

At the start of the process, schools are asked to provide contact details for a number of their top clients. These clients are then invited to take part in a telephone interview about the school which nominated them (primary interview) and, if they choose to, about a second school which they have used for customised programmes in the past 12 months (secondary interview).

The telephone interviews are conducted by a market research company, Objective Research. This year they were in English, Spanish, French and Mandarin.

In the course of the interviews, clients are asked to rate various aspects of the programme on a one to ten point scale, where one is “poor”, five is “average” and ten is “excellent”.

Further to this, the Financial Times defines three different categories of customised programme which are assigned different weights.

These, in descending weight order, are:

● Strategic: designed to determine and influence the strategy of the company.

● General: delivered to general management on operational aspects of the company.

● Functional: relating to a specific function – for example, marketing.

Different weights are also assigned to questionnaires depending on the seniority of the person responsible for specifying the programme, the size of the company and the number of business schools which the client has used for customised programmes.

In total, 678 business school clients were interviewed. Of these 74 also completed secondary interviews. Last year, 557 were interviewed, of whom 54 agreed to secondary interviews.

The data gathered from the interviews are used to compile the first 11 criteria in the table. These make up 80 per cent of the school’s final score.The final five criteria in the customised ranking are compiled using the statistical data supplied by the business schools. These account for 20 per cent of the final score.

In common with the customised ranking, the open enrolment ranking is also calculated using data gathered from two types of surveys. In this case, they are a questionnaire completed online by open enrolment programme participants and an online survey of statistical data completed by each participating business school.

Online questionnaires are distributed in English, French, Spanish and Italian to two groups of participants: those who took part in senior management programmes and those who participated in general management programmes.

More than 4,000 senior and general management course participants responded to the survey in 2007.

After the online questionnaire closes, data gathered from the senior and general participants are collated. Calculations for each of the two data sets are then completed separately. Finally the results are combined on the basis of a 50/50 weighting.

These results are used to compile the first 10 criteria, which account for 80 per cent of the school’s final score. Statistical data from the business school is used to calculate the final six criteria, which make up 20 per cent of the score.

In both rankings, calculations for the first section of the table include data from the previous one or two years (if applicable). The weightings are as follows: 55:45 on two years’ data and 40:33:27 if a school has participated every year for three years.

To calculate the final rankings all data points are converted to Z-scores. Z-scores take into account the differences between each business school and the distribution of scores between the highest and lowest scoring school for each of the criteria in the ranking.

The schools’ Z-scores for each of the criteria are then weighted. The weights for the first section of the table are determined by the level of importance that interviewees or questionnaire respondents attach to the different ranking criteria. The weights applied in the second section (the Business School Survey section) are decided by the Financial Times.

The sum of the weighted Z-scores across all criteria determines a school’s final position in the ranking. The combined ranking is calculated from the average Z-score for schools ranked in both the open enrolment and the customised programme surveys.

Market research for customised programmes by Objective Research, Eastbourne, UK. Database consultant Judith Pizer of Jeff Head Associates, Amersham, UK. Additional research by Wai Kwen Chan