MBA Jobs: Social media required

Not long ago social media was not much more than the linguistic umbrella for web applications which are built on user-generated content: blogs, wikis, networks, forums, sharing platforms, to name a few. This playground for the so-called early adopters turned into an industry the day international brandmarks discovered it for marketing purposes. Since branding is no kids’ business a new demand for MBA graduates with professional social media qualification has developed.

In January the blog Social Media MBA started posting MBA-level jobs in social media on their twitter profile and additionally published them in a weekly roundup. While their growing Twitter crowd reflects the interest in these positions on part of MBA graduates, adequate applicants are, nevertheless, hard to find: “Most of the job specs we are receiving have a requirement for social media knowledge,” said Mr. Begley, Head of Creative and Design Recruitment at Major Players, a London-based recruitment company, to the New York Times last week. “However, a limited number of candidates actually have that experience.”

Although it is hard to find a student who is not enthusiastic about social media, finding a social media professional is a different ballgame. The corporate use of Facebook, Twitter and the likes of them requires experiences that go beyond knowing how to upload a video to Youtube. Professor Piskorski from London Business School said to the New York Times: "Very often our perception of social media, and what we can and can’t do using social media, is very much tinted by what we think our favorite person is doing - and our favorite person is usually ourselves. So, it is about getting students to understand that the empirical skills are absolutely necessary, because whatever they think is intuitively correct, is probably correct about themselves, but nobody else.” And the numerous online articles with beaming headlines like “Essential Rules for Social Media” also don’t provide the necessary expertise to meet the requirements of high profile MBA jobs.

Four MBA students at MIT Sloan saw this coming and pro-actively developed a Social Media Workshop last year. With the approval of the Career Development Office, the team created a pair of workshops, "Twitter for Beginners" and "Social Media for Beginners." Each workshop was designed to lay out practical techniques for using Twitter and other online tools as part of the job search. While this first attempt was focused on job hunting, more business schools have now understood the broad influence of social media in business.

According to the New York Times, big names have already reacted to this demand for education in social media strategy: Harvard, London Business School and INSEAD have incorporated Social Media into their curricula. Besides teaching crucial technical skills which are necessary for the professional use of social media, the courses are rather hands-on projects than textbook knowledge. Regular readings by guest lecturers from successful networks like eHarmony, LinkedIn and MySpace have been an important pillar of the class run at LBS. At Wharton MBA students of Professor Hosanagar’s course Enabling Technologies implement the lessons learnt instantly: They run a blog, Twitter profile and Facebook fan page where their learnings get published, tested and discussed by their peers. 

This generation of MBAs will probably drive social media a lot further than their professors ever could think of.

• Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
  Full-Time MBA, Executive MBA
• MIT Sloan School of Management
  Full-Time MBA
• London Business School
  Full-Time MBA, Executive MBA
• INSEAD
  Full-Time MBA