By TEH SHI NING

THE downturn has hit executive pay worldwide, an unsurprising trend that showed up in data collected for the Financial Times (FT) 2009 ranking of executive MBA (EMBA) programmes - part-time MBA degrees for senior working managers.

EMBA graduates' average salary three years after they complete the programme is now US$148,800 (S$207,233.76), 2.5 per cent lower than last year, according to FT's analysis, released yesterday. This year's ranking surveyed 113 business schools and 3,770 alumni from the EMBA class that graduated in 2006. The drop could have been steeper given the information collected includes discretionary bonuses.

Growth in the salaries of EMBA graduates has been squeezed too, falling to 55 per cent in 2009 from 65 per cent last year.

The fall in executive earnings varied across sectors. Average pay rose in the transport and logistics, media and marketing and the information technology and telecoms sectors - but only a fifth of the alumni surveyed work in these. In all other sectors except retail, which was constant, executives reported lower pay than in last year's survey.

In the consultancy and finance/banking sectors, which employ a quarter of the EMBA graduates surveyed and are traditionally the top payers, average pay dipped 5 and 3.2 per cent respectively. And business schools themselves have felt the effect of the downturn on EMBA enrolment.

While full-time MBAs tend to attract more applications in a downturn, EMBAs do not, as companies cut back on sponsorship, the FT report said.

Data from the schools showed enrolment slowed globally, though there were regional variations. On average, 75 students per school joined the class of 2009, compared with 83 last year.

This article was first published in The Business Times.