What Jobs Can You Get With A Harvard MBA?

“That not only present to you the data, but actually teach you about what recruiting looks like on campus and give you a deep dive into some really popular industries like consulting and tech, so you have a better idea of what you're going into before you actually recruit for those jobs. Important thing.”

Hello, welcome back to MBA Monday. I am Angela Guido, the founder of Career Protocol. And if you're paying attention, you may have noticed I'm wearing my sparkly shirt, which means we have some big news today, something very, very exciting. I also have a special guest for us. Don't go away. I'll be right back.

All right, what's all the hubbub? Why the sparkly shirt, Angela? It's the Career Protocol Career Report release moment. We have been working on this thing for two years. Not really. We skipped a year because it's so much work. This is version two of the Career Protocol complete MBA Placement Report. It is your most complete and useful guide to thinking about your post-MBA career. And we're incredibly excited to offer it to you, all of you, everyone in the entire universe, for free. I may have lost you because you've gone down to the description to download the report, by all means, please do so. But before you do, let me just tell you a little bit about this report. And importantly, let me introduce our special guest today, Jackie Laine, none other than Career Protocol’s resident career specialist. She authored this report and made sure that it's as awesome as possible for you. Hello, Jackie.

Jackie: Hi, Angela. Thanks for introducing me. Hello, YouTube universe. It's nice to meet you guys, too. I'm Jackie. I'm a Senior Instructor here at Career Protocol. I also love getting deep into data and love helping people figure out what their career next steps should be, so this was an awesome project to work on. A little bit about me: I'm a former reality TV producer, a former project leader at BCG, a Kellogg alum and caffeine-free party person, which I've been told is unusual and I should share that as often as possible.

AG: I'm the one who told her that. But among all of those credentials, you probably noticed that there were several that make Jackie ideally positioned to do an in-depth write-up on what it means to get a post-MBA job out of your MBA. She started in a creative field and then moved right into BCG. And in fact, one of the things I think you're going to love most about this report is that it's totally BCG-ified. Thanks to Jackie, we even got rid of all the pie charts. If you know, you know. Jackie, tell us, what do you think are like the two most important things about this report that that people should be really excited about?

Jackie: So the first thing I think people should be really excited about is just sort of being able to, like Scrooge McDuck dive into the amount of data that we've got in here. So as you're looking at schools, you should definitely be looking at the employment placement reports that each school puts out. It tells you where they're sending their graduates, what fields, how much money they're making, what regions they’re going to. They’re so data rich, each one. And we went across all 30 of them for the top 30 ranked US business schools and brought the data together in one place. So we have a section where we make sense of that for you and then a section where we just present you a ton of data that you can go through yourself and take your own learning journey through the report. I think that's really juicy and exciting.

The second thing that I think is fantastic is that we've added some new guides to the report that not only present to you the data, but actually teach you about what recruiting looks like on campus and give you a deep dive into some really popular industries like consulting and tech. So you have a better idea of what you're going into before you actually recruit for those jobs – important thing – and also some very alluring but not very common post-MBA jobs that I think people hold a lot of assumptions about that are quickly debunked once they get to school. We're just trying to debunk those earlier. So you know what you're getting into if you're interested in venture capital, social impact, entertainment and more.

AG: There were lots of kind of surprise insights in the data, as there always are. Whenever you put together a big and interesting data set and, you know, Scrooge McDuck dive into it, as Jackie so eloquently put it, you find some surprising things. So I don't want to do too many spoilers because I really want you guys to just go and download the report and read it yourself, and hold it, and love it for your very own. But, Jackie, what are some of the most interesting, like, myths that got debunked or surprises or things that maybe, like people wouldn't know before they examined the report?

Jackie: Yeah. So when we were doing this report, we thought about, like, you know, when I was going to business school, what were assumptions I made and what are assumptions that people generally make about what schools they should be choosing based on what career they want. I think one of those assumptions is you have to go to a school that's like in an industry town or near an industry town. So I've got two examples: one kind of debunked and one not so debunked.

The first one is for tech jobs. Where do you go? I think the assumption is going to be go to a West Coast school, right. You're going to have proximity that's going to serve to your advantage. What we found is you actually don't need to be on the West Coast to recruit for tech. Tech’s a really, really hot industry at business schools and you can access it from all across the country. Actually, the schools that send the highest numbers of students into tech are Kellogg in the Midwest, and Harvard and Wharton and Columbia on the East Coast. So, you know, if you're into tech, you can kind of broaden your scope and look for those schools that are a great fit for you. You don't need to be on the West Coast.

The one that we confirm, though: if you want to go into finance, get as close to New York as you can. It’s really to your benefit to be on the East Coast. So, schools that send the highest percentage of their students into financial services are on the East Coast, like Wharton, Cornell, Harvard. So if you're into finance that like those New York region schools, East Coast, that's going to be your best bet. It’s actually gonna give you the best opportunities.

The other one that I wanted to point out is like, I think a little juicy and it's like we just met, you know? So it's maybe not proper to talk about money right away and how much money you might make after business school, but like, let's do it. So the other assumption we wanted to test was how much money you make based on the rank of the school that you go to. Alright? If you go to a higher-ranked school, you're going to make more money, so much more money that if you don't get into one of the top 10 schools, like what are we doing here even? This is not something that I personally think you need to worry so much about. Let me break it down for you a little bit. If you go to a top 10 school, your average median salary is going to be about 150k post-MBA. That's awesome. If you go to a school ranked 11 through 30, you're looking at a hundred and thirty thousand dollars as your average starting salary post-MBA. Twenty thousand dollars is not like, loose sofa change by any means, but you're going to be making a good amount of money and regardless of what program you go to, you're going to have a ton of opportunity. So we present some of these things and hope that it helps to focus your school choice and also relieve some of the pressure that you might be putting on yourself in terms of what schools you should be applying to and whether schools are or aren't worth applying to. They are. All of them. They're magnificent depending on what you want, of course.

AG: That was awesome, Jackie. I can't wait for you all to read all of that and both get you excited about your post-MBA career and put your mind at ease that whatever school you're considering is going to set you up for long-term success. One last question for you, Jackie, before we let you go. Tell us a little bit about the journey of creating the Career Protocol MBA Placement Report this year. How was that for you?

Jackie: So creating the report was a journey of self discovery, a bit. So we had the 2019 report to work from and it was beautiful. It was dense with data, very detailed. Fantastic. Very long, you know. In my head, I was like, let's make this shorter. Let's make this shorter. We can do it! I think I added like 20 pages to the report, because as I got into it, getting all this data together and starting off these analyzes is like a big job. So the 2019 report was like the year of that data. Let's get into it. Let's help you figure out what it means. Let's get it all in one place. Magnificent. 2021 was really the year of: “OK, great. Now that we have all this data, what else can we give to you so that you understand looking for jobs at business school and what those jobs actually look like beyond sort of the loose assumptions you might have about them going in?”. I don't know about you guys, but when I was applying to business school, I definitely idealized all of the jobs that I was looking at post-MBA. And so we wanted to give you and a lot of bubbles got burst once I got to business school. So not that we're trying to burst your bubbles, but we're trying to give you the “real real”, real early so you can start to make these decisions going in and you don't feel as rushed once you start business school. So that was the journey for me. It was discovering how much I felt really compelled to add more information in here so people knew what they were getting into earlier and earlier. So you have a longer report, but it's got even more fantastic information and lots of great data. It was definitely a journey to do it because I had to do this, had to do the spreadsheets, I had to look at the things, but super fun and super interesting. And if I could have the time and if you guys had the willingness to read a two hundred and fifty page career report, and I wanted to dedicate the next three years of my life to it, it would be super interesting the whole way. But I'm not doing that because it's too much.

AG: That was awesome, Jackie, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for creating this brilliant work of career awesomeness. Thank you so much for being such an amazing instructor on the Career Protocol team. Jacqui and I have been friends for a really long time. What is it, five years? Six years? I don't even remember. It's like since we were wee little lasses. In any event, this has been another #MBAMonday. We're so excited to share the Career Report with you. Please go download it in the link below. It's free. It's free forever. Download it and enjoy it. And on your way down there, just hit that little red subscribe button, turn it gray, become a subscriber to MBA Mondays so that you don't miss any of our amazing insights, free stuff, goof balling and you know, just MBA awesomeness. But everybody who wants Jacqui to spend the next three years creating our next Career Report, please leave us a comment in the comments section.