Can an MBA transform your business?

Source: Technology Digital

Date :21/11/2007 05:06:28

An MBA is seen these days as an international currency, or rather a kind of bearer bond that can be turned into either cash or other advantages. But is that currency keeping its value?

By John O’Hanlon

Someone out there thinks I need an MBA. And I don’t mind betting that if I paid the altogether reasonable ‘administrative fee’ of $2,000 it wouldn’t be long before I was in possession of a finely wrought document that would put to shame my (genuine but typewritten) Cambridge degree certificate.

But then a lot of people who have somehow obtained my home e-mail address seem to think I need Viagra and personal enhancement as well, so what do they know? When the ‘MBA’ brand starts to be counterfeited it is a sure sign there’s value in the idea. Like a faux Rolex, it taints the brand, but it’s a compliment to the ‘real thing’.

There will always be a demand for courses as long as MBA graduates are sought in the recruitment market. Certainly, last year showed no sign of disenchantment from employers, with the Graduate Management Admission Council reporting in its USA survey for 2005-06 that job openings for MBA graduates are improving. And the director of career services at London Business School (LBS) Graham Hastie went so far as to call the employment market at the start of 2007 as ‘frenzied’.

A Magnificent Bankable Asset

97 percent of LBS’s 2006 cohort of MBA students had received a job offer within three months of graduation and all first year students secured either an internship or a project during the summer months. Most of them (42 percent) went into the financial sector, with a further 25 percent entering management consultancy as their first career move. Pharmaceuticals, technology and telecoms are increasingly recognizing the value of an MBA, according to Hastie. Wharton shows a very similar pattern, with 45 percent taking the finance route.

Across the board, American as well as European employers clearly find the MBA currency sound. The GMAC report said that two out of five of new hires in 2005 had an MBA, and in May this year it announced that its latest research shows that employers plan to boost the number of new MBAs they hire in 2007. On the other hand they are reporting less interest in people with only an undergraduate education. Corporate recruiters expect to hire an average of 18 percent more workers with MBAs and other graduate business degrees this year than they did in 2006, according to the 2007 GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey.

And they are paying for this policy in hard currency. In the USA the average salary for newly recruited MBAs went up to $92,000 in 2006, while in the UK the average salary for all MBA-specific jobs offered in the IT sector is currently in the region of £69,000…

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