In BusinessWeek Magazine’s recent survey of executive education, U of T’s Rotman School of Management placed 18th in the world for their custom programs.

The survey is based entirely on the opinions of the people who use their programs. Jim Fisher, Associate Dean for executive programs, says that they were “pleased and surprised” by the results of the survey, because “of all the surveys that get done, this was a pretty pure piece of research. We were pleased that the people who do our programs thought so highly of us.”

The Rotman School stood out because of their Custom Corporate Education program, which provides custom training to a range of corporate clients such as Manulife Financial, Ontario Power Generation, Rogers Cable, and University Health Network. Rotman also has an open-enrolment program that did not appear in the survey.

The survey “was a very good thing for us and for the university,” said Fisher. The service is a way “we bring in extra revenue for the university” and a way of making “faculty relevant and useful to people in the community.”

The program is extra work for faculty members who decide to get involved, as they still have to fulfill regular teaching duties.

The survey also indicates “that our customers think we’re doing a good job,” said Fisher, and that “their organizations work better because of the time they spent with us. It’s like getting that rare A…or even A+.” It is quite the achievement because, as Fisher said, the “people ahead of us are pretty impressive [and] are not an easy group to be compared to.” Duke and Harvard took the top two spots, and Rotman was the only Canadian school to place in the Top 20 custom programs.

Fisher says that executive education is something the Rotman School has always done, but in the past five years they have consciously worked harder on these programs and have become better at it. This is the first time the Rotman School has participated in the survey. “Until this last round,” Fisher explains, “we were never big enough to get rated.”

Rotman’s Executive MBA program also ranked third in the world in the teaching of strategy.

Rotman’s also ranked well in a recent Financial Times survey, placing 32nd among executive MBA programs in the world, and 21st in full-time international MBA programs.