Over 100 000 people a year choose to study for an MBA all over the world. With young professionals recognising that there are no “jobs for life”, an MBA can provide skills to make an individual more marketable and to provide greater career choice.
If you are interested in becoming an international manager you may soon join the ranks of qualified MBAs. But business schools are not all the same. You need to carefully research your choice of school to ensure that it matches your personal requirements.
QS World MBA Tour and Topmba.com annually conduct research of 400 business schools, 50Â 000 MBA applicants and 500 MBA recruiters to assist you and some of the findings are summarised below.
Step 1: Why should I take an MBA?
The very first step is to analyse your personal motivations for taking an MBA. Are you a career switcher, or a career progresser? Do you want to carry on working while you take your MBA, or do want to focus on your studies and consider your options? Is a jump in salary what matters most, or do you seek international experience? Is your primary goal to broaden your education and your horizons, or to develop specialist skills for career enhancement? An honest self-assessment will save you a great deal of time and energy and help you make a more focused selection of schools.
Our research demonstrates that MBA applicants around the world take an MBA for career-related reasons. Year after year, MBA applicants have reported that improving career prospects and learning new skills are the main motivators to take an MBA. Building a professional network comes next, followed by enabling a career change, which has diminished in importance in recent years. Boosting salary remains only the fifth most important factor, comparable with starting an own business. Only about 20% of people take an MBA just for the education.
Step 2: Self-assessment to identify my career goals
The second thing to do is to try to narrow down the type of career you might like to pursue, balanced by a realistic self-assessment of your current abilities and skills base. Examine your motives carefully. Determining where you want to work after your studies should be a major part of this process.
Why ask these questions? For practical reasons, most business school application forms ask for your career aspirations. They want to see a clear, cogent explanation of where you want to be in the future and why that school can help you get there.
Step 3: Budget and study mode
The full-time MBA is still by far the most popular programme in terms of candidate numbers. Part-time and executive MBAs are growing, but are still quite small by comparison. The standard period for an international full-time MBA in the United States is two years. Schools such as Wharton, Harvard and Stanford cost approximately $38Â 000 for tuition per annum.
In Europe, the annual cost of an MBA can be as little as £5 000 or as much as £34 000 for tuition, with books and living expenses a further cost.
If you wish to carry on working during your MBA, this will narrow down your choice of schools very quickly. Part-time, executive MBA and distance-learning study become the only options. For example, more than 25 000 people are now using distance learning for an MBA or similar diploma with British institutions alone. Average costs for distance learning vary from £4 000 to £20 000 spread over three to eight years. Within the distance learning arena, the schools most often referenced by human resource directors include: Aston, Durham, Henley, Heriot-Watt, Manchester Business School, Open Business School, Strathclyde and Warwick.
Step 4: Determining the criteria for your choice of school
Despite the media frenzy surrounding rankings, our research suggests that candidates vary significantly in terms of the criteria which matter to them in selecting a business school. During the World MBA Tour (see Page 4), candidates can review TopMBA Scorecard — a radically new applicant research tool which will allow them to apply their own weightings to a detailed set of selection criteria. Our research indicates that the most popular selection criteria for choosing a business school (all of which appear in TopMBA Scorecard), based on our 2005/6 research, are the following:
• International reputation is one of the most important of selection criteria — reputation among recruiters is an indicator of the quality of a programme. As a rule, the stronger the reputation of a school, the higher the salary at the end of the programme (but for weaker candidates this may be counterproductive, as overly high salary expectations can lead to a frustrating job search).
• Career placement record is a priority for the majority of applicants — helping candidates in their job search is a key component of the MBA. Each business school has a career service department. Some schools attract companies to come on campus to interview students. The Wharton School in Philadelphia attracts as many as 400 companies to campus, of which roughly 300 are US-based recruiters and 100 are international recruiters.
• Return on investment is a further key criterion — candidates are not looking for low-cost MBAs. Generally they are looking for a long-term career benefit measured by accelerated career progression and salary uplift — the problem is measuring this!
• Specialisations — as candidates become more familiar with the business school arena, they begin to narrow down their selection based on school strengths which match their own interests. Though many MBAs are general management programmes, an increasing number emphasise areas of particular strength.
• Rankings exert an important influence on school reputation, but with the proliferation of rankings in recent years, there is evidence of growing scepticism and a desire on the part of applicants to dig deeper.
• Teaching style does not matter to everyone, but many candidates do not want to learn using entirely the case method and will look for schools which provide a hybrid of styles, or place an emphasis on team-based and consulting projects.
• Profile of students/alumni — longer average level of work experience, average GMAT score, percentage who are from overseas, educational background, languages required, success of alumni are all important differentiators.
• Quality of faculty research — a school’s reputation for producing original research influences overall prestige, but plays second fiddle if there is no obvious career benefit for the candidate.
• Location — as more and more candidates become internationally mobile, the choice of location is figuring ever more highly on candidate lists. This makes sense. Often a candidate is best advised to study in the region where he/she wishes to work, because the job search will be easier, and access to networks and alumni should be superior (subject to visa availability).
Step 5: Which information sources should I use?
MBA applicants are faced with a large range of rankings and information sources. Rankings are a popular method for determining school reputations, but with so many rankings, all producing different results, it is becoming quite complex for applicants to judge which are the best schools. Our applicant research identifies the following usage of rankings and guides. Business Week rankings and TopMBA were the most popular sources of information, followed by the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
In the context of our MBA applicant research, respondents were also asked which research methods they found very useful in their search. School websites proved to be the most useful information source for MBA applicants, followed by face-to-face meetings with representatives of the schools, and then MBA fairs (97% of respondents found the QS World MBA Tour to be useful or very useful).
For information on business schools, the Global 100 Top Business Schools Research asks MBA recruiters to identify the schools they target for MBA recruitment. This helps identify the 80 most popular schools in the US and Europe as well as the 20 most popular schools in Australasia and Latin America.
Nunzio Quacquarelli is the editor of the TopMBA Career Guide