Dedicated leadership education is actually a relatively modern progression in personal development.

Back in the 1930\’s and 1940\’s, a business leader could have taken a course on \’How to Win Friends and Influence People\’ run by Dale Carnegie, or a course on how to autocratically manage a factory in the style of Henry Ford.

They wouldn\’t however, have been able to find a leadership course where they could learn about leadership theory. The main reason for this is clear: Leadership theory can credit most of its early beginnings to the explosion in social science halfway through the 20th Century, during which, great minds such as Henry Mintzberg and Maslow came to prominence.

In the UK today, one can take a leadership degree or a leadership masters course from a reputable university, such as Lancaster University, who\’s executive leadership course is co-directed by none less than Henry Mintzberg himself.

Alternatively, one can enrol to take purely online leadership courses, ranging from uncertified diplomas (for the benefit of personal development only) to fully certified degrees from accredited colleges.

The range of options is certainly vast, but where will Leadership education develop in the future?

One important factor that sets leadership education apart from almost all other schemes is that it is very rarely taught to a bachelor or post graduate student with no prior business management experience. Indeed, leadership courses are most often sponsored by companies after they hire a new recruit into their C-Suite ranks. This means that the average student is comfortably over 30 years old, and cost is not as much a factor as with other subjects.

As it stands currently, I believe that the notion that leadership courses have effectively become the new, leaner MBAs for the managing director of tomorrow, will actually hold back leadership programme development. This is because the number of board directors in the UK is naturally a rather small and restricted field. In reality if you extended the range of people studying leadership courses all the way down to middle management, this would result in a surge of demand for institutions that other such a course.

What would cause the \’catchment area\’ of leadership education to slip down the ranks? Cost of course! MBAs, Executive Leadership Courses and similar programmes cost in excess of £10,000 per head, which makes it unimaginable that any FTSE100 or S&P500 company would roll them out to their middle managers. If universities and learning institutions were able to craft a new course model designed for larger classes and a higher volume of students, then companies would really start showing their interest in growing the position that leadership education currently has within corporate training courses.

This could be a bright future – if only Universities set their sights a little \’lower\’, and unlock the potential revenue and thus future investment that such a surge would cause. More students requires more teachers, and more teachers will result in existing colleges and universities expanding to include leadership within their core subject offerings.

Author Bio: Simon Oates writes about a wide range of leadership areas including leadership courses and leadership styles at Leadership-Expert.co.uk

Category: Education
Keywords: Leadership, MBA, Training, Courses, Education, Management, Personal Development