Often fraught with angst, the decision to carve a career in the family business can be a double-edged opportunity.

As much for the purpose of stamping professional authority and lending gravitas as for forward thinking efficiency, acquiring specialised business knowledge may be the key to climbing the ladder of success while sustaining workable relationships with relatives who occupy enterprise-critical posts.

Bringing a business or financial degree is a good move. Coupled to its pre-acceptance stipulation of extensive experience, bringing an MBA qualification may be even better. The trouble is that most MBA programmes, even from the best accredited business schools, tend to be skewed towards the bigger structures of large corporations.

Only comparatively recently has there been an acknowledgement that the leaner, more agile small or medium enterprise has its own set of cultures to which different solutions and modified planning methodologies should be applied.

The early adopters of the flatter management structures now sought by modern public corporates, are the entrepreneurial, growth-oriented and often family-managed SMEs of today. My eye was recently taken by an announcement from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh that it intends to introduce two post graduate programmes that relate to that purpose.

Subject to the usual validation, it will add the MSc in International Business and Leadership with Family & Smaller Enterprise, and an MBA in Family & Smaller Enterprise. The move follows five years of research with bodies such as the Scottish Family Business Association (SFBA).

In 2014, a major research project involving QMU’s business curriculum leaders revealed how family businesses and, more generally, SMEs have the potential to boost Scotland’s annual economy by up to £1.23 billion.

Looked at as a sector in its own right, family enterprises represent a mini economic powerhouse that carries potential in sustainable employment growth. In Scotland, SMEs account for 99.3 per cent of private sector enterprises – a surprising 63 per cent are family businesses.

While large multi-national groups remain big providers of jobs and contributors of revenues, we are told SMEs constitute the backbone of the economy. It is estimated about half of private sector Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Scotland is created by family businesses.

Most big firms, whether services or manufacturing led, are located close to cities and their major arterial hubs. SMEs of notable critical mass permeate nearly all Scottish geographies.

In rural areas in particular, the family business is an important pillar in safeguarding existing jobs with untapped potential in building local employment resilience. Yet there are threats peculiar to the breed that remain largely unaddressed.

In career and economic terms, these new qualifications might just prove pivotal. The more relevant the qualification, the greater the number attracted to it and encouraged to stay or move back to the family crown jewels, the better. New thinking can spark fresh investment. Even if that means a degree of automation, upscaling and upskilling headcount will tend to be on the agenda. The ability of the MD/CEO/Principal to fully identify, justify and optimise the case will be respected.

Succession management, one of the big hazards in family businesses as directors jostle for position following MD retirement, is better controlled. You can argue about character and untested aptitude but not the cold, hard qualifications and experience of the best man, or woman, for the job. SFBA has found that women are statistically more likely to head a family firm than is the general business trend.

The result is more accurate identification of opportunity and greater success in accessing it – ushering in the need for more people with higher skills. Ignorance is not bliss; only about a third of family businesses survive much beyond the first generation, according to SFBA.

Back at QMU, the two new specialist programmes offer "experienced business professionals", recent business graduates and those returning to the family enterprise after studying for an unrelated degree, greater insight into the value, practice and function of this business model. Topics will include that thorny subject of succession, alongside governance, behavioural finance and risk.

The university is adamant that more needs to be done to support family businesses. Dr Claire Seaman, Reader in Enterprise and Family Business at QMU, says: "We will continue to engage with Scotland’s SME and family business policy makers and practitioners to explore ways of improving the growth and sustainability of this vital sector." That is shorthand for finding solutions to embracing the latent growth potential I mentioned. Seaman is an internationally published authority on the issues affecting family businesses, particularly the barriers they face in scalability and continuity.

"If we want to change thinking and practice and improve business succession across these businesses, we need an integrated approach to learning, research and influencing policy," she insists.

Of course cultural obstacles affect more than the managing family unit. It could be argued that talented young managers seeking fast-track promotion based on pure merit, but with no personal ties to the board dynasty, will soon move elsewhere when met with a glass ceiling, the other side of which is home to an entrenched and commercially dangerous blood-thicker-than-water maxim.

Then again a relevantly educated family business executive will want to bring forward people brighter than them, or with obvious complementary capacities, expanding the top team in order to advance the bottom line.