Do you know which MBA programs are best for your MBA career path? How can you tell which school will give you the best MBA career opportunities? Tune in this week for Angela’s MBA career advice to learn how to research career opportunities at your schools!
In this video, Angela explains how important it is to research MBA career paths post-MBA and how they align with your MBA goals. Do the companies you want to work at recruit at your favorite schools? How does geography factor into your best MBA program decision? Angela explains it all in this MBA Monday video chock full of MBA career guidance!
Confused about where to start researching MBA programs and looking for some MBA career guidance? I've got you covered. Welcome back to MBA Monday.
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript.
I'm Angela Guido, the founder of Career Protocol, and I am on step two of a four-step deep dive into the research you need to do on your MBA programs before you choose the best schools for you, and then create your applications to figure out the best MBA career paths for you. So last time I talked about the three big pieces of MBA research that you need to do. And today I'm going to talk about the first piece, which is understanding your MBA career opportunities.
Get Your MBA Career Goals in Order!
So, the first thing you should do is check out and download Career Protocol’s MBA Career Placement Report. We took the time to analyze all of the placement reports from all of the top MBA schools and aggregate that data in a way that you can parse it and dissect it and really understand the best target MBA schools for you. Because really the first question that you should have when you research MBA schools is “Does this MBA program get me to where I want to go?”. So, start with your MBA career goals and game plan and look at your medium-term strategy. What is the job that you want to get after your MBA? And then look and see which schools best facilitate the opportunities that you actually want (make sure to check out the school’s MBA employment report too!). There are several things to consider in this calculation. The first for most people is geography. If there's a specific place that you want to be after school, then it's a really good idea to target business schools that make it easier to recruit for companies in those geographies.
There's a little bit of an East Coast West Coast thing here that's pretty obvious. If you want to be in Silicon Valley, it’s probably a good idea to head to one of the West Coast schools. If you really feel like you want to be in New York, it's going to be a lot easier to recruit for New York companies from schools that are on the East Coast. And then if you're geographically agnostic, that opens up a whole bunch of other, different options. But you are still going to need to think about industry and to consider some MBA career advice. If you want to be in tech, most of the action in tech is happening on the West Coast – not exclusively – but most of it. So, if you're sure you want to be in tech, you might be looking more towards the West Coast for your MBA. And different industries are dispersed in different ways so be sure to understand where you want to be post MBA and look at the schools that give you opportunities in those geographies.
Do Some Digging – Check Out the MBA Career Report
But don't stop at geography. You also need to think about the industries and the functions that each school makes available, as well as factors such as the MBA career management available at the schools you’re interested in. Now, most schools do really well in consulting. Most schools do pretty well in finance as well as in marketing. However, depending on which specific industry you want to go into and which specific role you want to play, you would want to really look and see what the data says about where students go to work after their MBA at all the different schools, as well as the MBA career support services they offer. This is why our MBA career report is so useful, because we've aggregated all this information across all the schools and there are all kinds of cool charts and graphs in there so that you can understand exactly what schools are best at facilitating which opportunities. Related to this is which kinds of companies recruit at the schools you’re targeting. The number one school that Amazon recruited at for many, many years wasn't Harvard. It wasn't Stanford. It was the University of Michigan. They recruited more MBAs from Michigan Ross for Amazon than they did from all of the other schools. Now, those numbers change over the years, but that would have been a really useful piece of information to know at that time if you really wanted to go work at Amazon. So, again, go download our MBA career report, but don't stop there. Be sure that you also research personally with the schools. And the best way to do that is during a campus visit or while you're talking to someone at a forum, ask specific questions about what MBA career opportunities the school facilitates.
The best way to do this is to talk to a representative of the career services team. They don't always make these folks available because they're busy helping all their students get jobs. But if you can have a conversation with MBA career support, especially if you really want to go into a niche industry or you want to make a radical geographic change from where the school is located to your first MBA job, talking directly to career services and understanding which MBA career opportunities the school actually facilitates is going to make a huge difference in helping you choose the best school for you.
That's it for today. Join us on the next #MBAMonday where we'll talk about how to research the education itself.
Let’s have a conversation!
Start your journey with Career Protocol today.
Angela Guido
Student of Human Nature| Founder and
Chief Education Officer of Career Protocol