Nova SBE Breaks Into the Financial Times Global Top 10 for Executive Education in Customised Programmes — Católica Porto Joins as Sixth Portuguese School, Iscte and Universidade do Porto Move Up in Open Enrolment

Nova School of Business and Economics entered the Financial Times global top 10 for executive-education customised programmes in the 2026 ranking the British financial daily published over the weekend of 17-18 May, landing at 9th place worldwide alongside London Business School, IMD and INSEAD. The same edition keeps Portugal anchored at six schools across the two FT executive-education rankings (customised and open-enrolment), with Católica Porto Business School entering the customised list for the first time at 99th place — the structural development the country's higher-education sector has been targeting since the 2023 edition first counted Católica Porto outside the FT cohort.

The Customised Programmes Read

The customised-programmes ranking — the FT's measurement of bespoke executive-education contracts that business schools build to a client's specific learning brief — places Nova SBE at 9th, Iscte Business School at 31st (up from 44th), ISEG-Lisbon School of Economics & Management at 48th (held flat), Universidade do Porto at 54th (down from 42nd), Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics at 76th (down from 50th) and Católica Porto Business School at 99th (new entry). Nova SBE's 9th-place reading is the first Portuguese top-10 entry on the FT customised list since the ranking's launch.

The Open Enrolment Read

The open-enrolment ranking — the FT's measurement of the standardised executive-education catalogues each school sells to general-audience cohorts — keeps Nova SBE at 20th, lifts Católica Lisbon to 26th (up 11 positions), Universidade do Porto to 35th (from 43rd), Iscte to 51st (from 68th), and holds ISEG at 70th. Católica Porto enters the open-enrolment list at 85th. Five of the six Portuguese schools either climbed or held position on the open-enrolment table — a stronger collective read than the customised ranking, where three of the six lost ground.

The Indicator Breakdown

Pedro Brito, CEO of Nova SBE Executive Education, framed the milestone in the school's release: the 9th-place customised entry positions the Carcavelos-headquartered institution 'a par com instituições como a London Business School, IMD e INSEAD'. The FT's per-indicator detail shows Nova SBE moving from 3rd to 2nd worldwide on the Future use indicator (the measure of participant likelihood-to-return), and climbing to 6th globally on the Follow-up indicator (post-programme participant tracking). Católica Lisbon Rector Filipe Santos publicly read 19 consecutive years inside the FT executive-education list as 'um grande motivo de orgulho'. ISEG President João Duque framed the rankings as 'um indicador importante de como o trabalho das escolas é reconhecido internacionalmente'.

What This Means for Expats

Local executive-education access: the six FT-ranked Portuguese schools all run English-medium customised and open programmes, with Nova SBE, Católica Lisbon and Porto Business School (PBS, ranked separately on the FT MBA tables) the centre-of-gravity for expat senior-management cohorts in Lisbon and Porto.
Employer co-funding: Portuguese corporate tax allows full deduction of executive-education spend as a Categoria A business expense, and most large employers in Lisbon's tech, banking and consultancy clusters carry a structured tuition-reimbursement budget for non-Portuguese senior hires.
EU-residency education pipeline: the FT rankings carry weight in expat networking and headhunting cycles inside Lisbon's growth-stage company stack — local executive education is now a competitive signal rather than a backup option against the LBS, INSEAD and HEC routes.
What happens next: the FT MBA ranking publishes in February 2027 and is the table that carries fuller weight on full-time executive talent flow into Portugal. Nova SBE's 9th-place customised entry is the structural data point most likely to lift the Carcavelos campus's 2027 application volume.