Career and Personal Benefits: Enduring and Ephemeral
I recently gave a series of workshops in Europe on "How the MBA Helps Your Career." I focused my remarks on three tangible outcomes that all students should expect to achieve from their MBA programs:
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1. Development and honing of analytical skills with which to identify, analyze and address business problems.
2. Development and mastery of people-leading and people-management skills.
3. Development and deepening of life-long personal and professional relationships with other students in the program.
Analytical Skills: Consistently High Marks
I found myself spending progressively more time with the second and third
outcomes as I moved my workshop from Paris to London whatsApp number database to Frankfurt and finally to Zurich. There were good reasons for this shifting of emphasis as I become more familiar with the questions and decisions facing my workshop participants. My audience consisted of European professionals evaluating both a) whether to pursue MBA studies and, once that decision was made, b) where to pursue those studies. As an aid to making the second decision, the outcome relating to analytical skills was of minimal value. Teaching analytical skills, arguably a great help in analyzing and addressing business problems, is the forte of virtually every MBA program that carries the imprimatur of the AACSB or comparable elite accrediting agency. In fact, in every "consumer" survey asking employers of MBA's what attributes among graduates they routinely find most developed, analytical skills are always at the top of the "most satisfied with" list.
So based on a program's effectiveness in teaching analytical skills, it's apparently hard to go wrong. Big schools, small schools, well-known schools, and little-known schools - they all produce MBAs who get high marks for analysis and technical competency.
People Skills: Consistently Low Marks
If we glean from the same employer surveys the other consistent pattern of responses - most MBA programs do a lousy job, if they even make the effort, of teaching soft management skills. Interpersonal, people-management, and teaming skills consistently rank among those attributes that employers find the least well-developed among MBAs, and these are the skills which employers are least satisfied with when they have hired an MBA.