Today's MBA Students are Jumping Ship
An interesting trend is developing among today's MBA students.
87% of MBAs switch either functions or industries in their jobs directly before and after B-school. Some 69% switch both functions and industries. Individuals using a full-time MBA from an elite B-school to accelerate their current career paths are in the significant minority.
An interesting factoid to note is that only 3% of students worked in the Investment Banking Industry pre-MBA, while 11% work in the industry post-MBA. It seems an MBA is a ticket to change, and many are using that ticket to the fullest.
Your thoughts on this trend?
That 3% is probably skewed a bit low - more folks in business school were bankers at some point, then had some other job before business school.
To be fair to the data though, that doesn't change the story - virtually no on within the 11% # came from banking pre-MBA.
Roughly 15% of my M7 class is going for IB. A couple did IBM at small shops beforehand but most didnt. We also have a couple high finance guys (S&T, PE, AM) moving into or back into IB. It's definitely more than I expected coming in. But it's still probably only 25% of the 15% that is looking to do IB post school. They do happen to be the most succesful, though.
Makes sense, still a very expensive ticket to change
I'm in S&T considering doing an MBA to jump to IB. My headhunters are advising me against this, however, as I have been able to line up interviews with both HF's and PE shops...
The value of the MBA degree is increasingly questionable. It has more relative value add for career switchers, rather than people who are staying in the same line of work, since these days many firms will direct promote without an MBA.
Places are too big and too generic. Recruiter seems to see stars only when exBanker and exConsultants show up
Think banking's lost a lot of its sheen in recent years, actually. Everyone hates bankers now, plus bankers get paid less (relatively speaking).
These days it seems like everyone's into the whole search fund/ETA thing. Or impact investing.
Eh, while bankers get paid less than before, they still get paid the most of anyone post MBA except for buyside (which is extremely hard to get into post MBA, even for those with buyside experience).
This is nothing new, and frankly has been one of the main reasons why people have been doing an MBA going back to the 1980s.
There always has been a lot of horse trading going on. Ex-McKinsey going to Google, ex-Google engineer going to Goldman IBD, ex-JPM banker going to Bain, and so forth.
I don't have stats on this, but anecdotally the career switching ebbs and flows according to the job market. In bad times, less so. In healthier job markets like now, more so.
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