Employers Want M.B.A.s with Quality Work Experience

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Employers Want M.B.A.s with Quality Work Experience

by Ronald Alsop
Provided by CareerJournal.com
David Speicher is looking for a few good M.B.A.s who have made their share of mistakes.

To Mr. Speicher, head of human resources for a Philadelphia asset-management firm, the best M.B.A. students have made enough decisions and mistakes in their careers to have gained some valuable insight. "When someone makes one of those nausea-inducing errors in judgment," he explains, "he or she comes away with a blend of confidence and humility."

For example, he hired a student from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University in Atlanta who had worked nearly seven years as an accountant and an investment analyst before seeking an M.B.A. "I saw him as a candidate with a demonstrated work ethic and the maturity to introspectively explain what mistakes he'd made in the roles he'd held," says Mr. Speicher. "While he did not possess the ideal sales experience that I would have liked, these other points were too strong to ignore."

Hiring an M.B.A. graduate is an expensive proposition, and companies complain that too often they aren't immediately getting their money's worth from a green recruit. In The Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey, recruiters frequently criticize M.B.A. students for lacking enough specialized, "relevant" experience. Most recruiters say they expect a minimum of four or five years' experience, preferably in their industries. Some are even hoping for six or seven years.

Both quantity and quality of experience are crucial. Recruiters are looking for students who have learned to cope with ambiguity, adversity and conflict in the workplace. Some M.B.A.s believe "simply working two or three years entitles them to a leadership position immediately following graduation," says Jeff Rynbrandt, who does recruiting for Guidant Corp., a marketer of cardiovascular products. "To me, students need to have demonstrated success in their past job with positions of increasing responsibility and be able to articulate how their actions specifically contributed to those successes."

Recruiters also are wary of too much job-hopping--a red flag that students may have moved on because they weren't getting promoted. That's how Aaron Mitchell, a management consultant in Oakland, California, perceives people "who moved between five or six companies within a five-year period." Their resumes, he says, "are a common relic of the dot-com era, when the average tenure was less than a year." Even if an M.B.A. had advanced to a higher position at a new company, Mr. Mitchell finds it difficult to determine whether the applicant "demonstrated the motivation to move up through an organization."

But despite recruiters' concerns about adequate work experience, more business schools are admitting students either straight out of college or after only a year or two in the workplace. If they enforce a strict work-experience policy, business school officials say, they worry that they risk losing top-caliber undergraduates who might instead proceed to medical or law school.

Recruiters are noticing an increase in young M.B.A.s--and they find it troubling. Christopher O'Toole, a brand manager in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has seen more applicants recently with less than two years of work experience. "Their focus is not clear," he says. "I haven't been confident that they really know what they want to do because they haven't had a real job." Inexperienced students sometimes "have been oversold on what an M.B.A. can do for them," he adds, "and there may be some unrealistic expectations. Jobs may sound interesting or sexy before you get into them, but once you have experience, you have a much better idea of what you want and what it really takes to succeed."

While 22-year-olds are still a fraction of most M.B.A. classes, school officials clearly don't see eye to eye with recruiters. "The schools see the talented people we've missed, but the recruiters don't," says Edward Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. To try to ensure that it doesn't keep missing those great catches, dean Snyder's school has established the GSB Scholars program. Chicago undergraduates can apply to the M.B.A. program in their senior year. If they are provisionally admitted, they must then get two to three years of "substantive" work experience before starting classes.

It used to be more common for students to head right into an M.B.A. program after college. But during the 1990s, experience levels began creeping up, and by the end of the decade, most M.B.A. students were about 28 years old with at least five years of work experience under their belts.

Some of the top-ranked schools have relaxed experience requirements, partly in hopes of attracting more minorities and women. "We believe that going younger will result in a more diverse class," Dean Snyder says. Women, in particular, have proved elusive for many top M.B.A. programs, partly because some get married and start to think about having children when they reach the magical M.B.A. age of 28.

pumpkin

Most recruiters say they expect a minimum of four or five years' experience, preferably in their industries. Some are even hoping for six or seven years.

exactly

[此贴子已经被作者于2006-8-1 13:40:01编辑过]

dtiger

Totally agree with the article. Unfortunately, most b-schools are more concerned with income stream, instead of the real meaning/purpose of MBA education, at least now it is deviated from the original purpose of MBA.

During the past several years, I have seen a bunch of unexperienced MBA graduates. I really doubt how far they can go in the career path, without enough pre-MBA exposure to real difficulties in working environment.