MBA Careers

Young career-oriented professionals are on a permanent job hunt, writes Monika Hamori, professor at IE Business School in Madrid in the Harvard Business Review. Monika Hamori came to this conclusion together with her colleagues Jie Cao and Burak Koyuncu after conducting face-to-face interviews and analyzing two large international databases created from online surveys of more than 1,200 employees.

It is not exactly trivial to estimate the return of a specific education, since we cannot observe the development of people’s wages without that particular education. Examining the returns of an MBA is a bit easier because most programmes require work experience from the candidates they admit. Their wages allow an estimate how people actually develop after they received their MBA degree.

Stephen Greer started his own business straight after college, at the ripe old age of 24. He moved on to create a global scrap metal company, which he eventually sold for 250 million dollars. After Harvard Business Review had written about him and he had published his experiences in the book “Starting From Scratch”, Greer was invited to tour a number of business schools to talk about his life. On campus he was always presented with the same question, he writes: “You didn’t get an MBA, nor did many other successful entrepreneurs, so if I want to start my own company, is business school a worthwhile experience? Is it worth paying all this tuition — or will my degree just be a resume-builder?”

More and more nations are developing science and innovation systems, with 48 countries publishing more than 1,000 journal papers in science in 2009, compared to 38 nations in 1995 – a 26 percent increase. The fastest growth in scientific output happened in North East Asia and Singapore, with the growth of research in China being exceptionally rapid.

Did you know that the “world” economy existed only of small, local businesses with a handful of employees until the 17th century?

More recruiters and more individual companies are planning to hire MBA graduates this year. This is the result of the latest survey from the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which administers the GMAT test, one of the criteria relevant when applying for business school.

LinkedIn is not even ten years old. The networking site was launched in 2003 and by now has more than 135 million members in more than 200 countries. According to the company, there were nearly two billion people searches on LinkedIn in 2010 and about double the amount only a year later. Especially for recruiters, LinkedIn is a valuable tool that allows them to find job-seekers, headhunt employees and see who is connected to whom. To make a LinkedIn profile strong enough for recruiters and companies to become aware of it, there are a few tips to be followed.

Why study for an MBA? Which school to choose? And by which criteria? There is no one better qualified to answer these questions than the programme directors of business schools who observe the industry, its trends and its relative competitive advantages. Therefore the English national daily newspaper “The Independent” and Audencia Nantes School of Management in France asked the heads of 58 business schools in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, but not the United States for their opinion. The data such collected challenges some of the accepted facts concerning the Master of Business Administration.

“We are satisfied with the popular demand of seven recruiting companies”, explained Dr. Annegret Zurawski after the European MBA Career Fair,  which took place at the beginning of this month at International Congress Center in Berlin.” Due to the current economic recovery the demand of companies to recruit highly qualified MBA-graduates is reactivated”, adds the Adademic Director of Gisma .

Many first applicants find themselves shut out of the most popular business schools these days. There are just too many people applying for only a few spots. However, despite the first big disappointment: reapplying the next year might be much easier after having had the experience once already. We have found the best tips to strengthen a new application for you in a recent article from US News.

Doing business in Asia and struggling with the etiquette? Worry no more. Two Cambridge Executive MBA alumni are making it easier for westerners to do business in the East – with the creation of an iPhone app called Biz Etiz. For more information check out: http://bizetiq.com

Nunzio Quacquarelli, Managing Director of QS - the organisation behind the largest business education event in the world, the World MBA Tour -  about scholarships and other opportunities in the market for MBAs.

Some professions almost demand an MBA degree to excel in a big company. IT professionals, however, still focus a lot on their technology knowledge only. Now “Computerworld” argued in a recent article that IT specialists should consider an MBA to fast forward their career.

The business school class of 2010 fared better on the job market than the class of 2009. This is the conclusion of the Alumni Perspectives Survey that The Graduate Management Admission Council published these days. A recovering economy combined with more creative job search strategies and a willingness to expand their search criteria have helped the business school class of 2010: Out of 824 recent alumni from the class of 2010 surveyed in September, 88 percent were employed, up four percentage points from the class of 2009, surveyed a year before.

France has passed legislation obliging large firms to ensure that women account for at least 40 percent of boardroom positions within six years. Germany follows suit with a female minister for Labor who muses loudly in the “Spiegel” about quotas of 30 per cent for both executive and non-executive directors in publicly traded companies.