According to a recent poll by the careers and education group, QS, the company behind the World MBA Tour, there are almost no MBAs who regret having taken the qualification, but a significant proportion do wish that they had approached their studies in a different way. One of the most common regrets centres on a lack of planning for the programme and for the wider business school experience.
One respondent to the survey, who took his MBA at Henley Management School in the UK, expressed a view widely held when he said that, I was too busy winding up my previous job to read around those subjects such as finance and accounting, which were going to be relatively new to me. If Id found the time to do more preliminary work, I would have found the first few months a whole lot easier and consequently more productive. In my experience, the earlier you start thinking about and preparing for an MBA, the better.
This call for more preparation is strongly supported by Sujana Patel, a former Team Leader at NDS India (a News Corporation company) in Bangalore, now studying for an MBA at Thunderbird Garvin School of International Management in the US: Its really essential to talk to people who have already gone through the programme you are looking at, she says. It saves any sort of gap in expectations developing. According to Ms Patel, this is particularly important when it comes to understanding the amount of work you will be expected to undertake. It wasnt a problem for me because I had come from a very demanding job, but the teaching style, methodology, new cultural experiences all make it more important to talk to an alumni before hand.
Looking back on their time at business school, many experienced MBAs maintain that they should have thought more about what they were going to do for a job once they had graduated. An MBA is an excellent badge of quality, but, from a career point of view, it has to be used as part of an overall package of skills, experience and academic qualifications, says Mike Holmes of the MBA careers service, TopMBA Careers, and an MBA himself. There are still too many candidates who fail to gear their studies towards the sort of work they want to do when they graduate. Focusing on what the job market is likely to offer at the end of your programme is a very wise investment of time and effort. Sujana Patel agrees: Its always going to be a concern that there could be uncertainty in the job market when you graduate one to two years after beginning your studies. Thats why you have to make plans about where you want to work, with what sort of company and how you are going to make it happen.
However, as Ms Patel points out, researching the school, the programme and the likelihood of finding that dream job on graduating is just part of the picture. What talking to current students and alumni can also do for you is to prepare you for a completely life-changing experience. Leaving work to study again, particularly if you are going to be doing it overseas, can take some adjusting to, so make sure that the school, your fellow students and the environment are exactly right for you. And whatever you do, dont forget to ask about the weather in the country where the school is based its amazing just how much it can affect you when youre far from home!
Source: www.TopMBA.com