Post MBA Roles at F500 Companies
I'm transitioning after 5 years in the military and trying to clarify my goals post-MBA (had a humanities undergrad degree). Looking at various employment reports for top business schools, I noticed most people go into Finance or Consulting but then there is also a significant portion of the class going into "corporate" roles at F500 companies like Johnson and Johnson, Amazon, etc.
Does anyone know what type of roles people who take those jobs are filling? Is it mostly general management/product development type roles?
I am currently undecided between pursuing a career in IB, marketing or working for one of the aforementioned companies, if I can get more information on what type of jobs MBAs usually get with them.
Thanks for your help!
EDIT: Main reason I am considering marketing is for a better work-life balance than say with IB.
I just went through undergrad recruitment - I can't imagine the types of roles are that's different, only in seniority. Someone else correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, I interviewed at some F500s and got the impression that general management roles don't really exist anymore. All the roles available were for specific roles: accounting, corp development, legal, marketing, product development (generally engineering). I saw a few "Sales" roles which I imagine would be fairly generalist but didn't look into. Strategy roles, though not universally available, could be classified as management ish, but you'll still be learning a specific skill within a specific team. Even roles advertised as rotational generally only mean rotating within the teams of one group.
The majority of F500 post-MBA roles are in marketing, product management, operations and finance. There are some strategy and sales roles as well, but those are rarer. And there are a few true rotational/general management programs that move you through different roles and subsidiaries (most prominent example is Danaher).
But Noctus, I think you need to spend some time researching what these functions actually mean, and which ones you would enjoy doing. Marketing and investment banking are vastly different, work-life balance is probably the most superficial of the differences.
What are common/relatively easy to get f500 jobs straight from MBA business schools">M7/t15 programs? (Originally Posted: 03/13/2017)
What are common/easy to get f500 jobs from MBA business schools">M7/T15 programs? Like, positions that don't necessarily require relevant work experience for your practice area. Things like brand management, rotational programs, etc.? Thanks!
I'm just trying to figure out all the "good" jobs you can to go straight from an MBA, even if you don't have directly relevant WE. Of course, there's consulting, which many gun for.
But other options from what I've read include corporate strategy, business development, product management, operations, marketing, sales, rotational programs, leadership development, brand management, supply chain work, corp dev, etc. Are there anything else/any other industry/f500/in-house (and non-industry) jobs that I'm missing/overlooking?
I think you've got a pretty good list there. Most of the common ones are the first ones you named though you (intentionally) left out the LDPs (FLDP, LDP, etc.).
I think it tends to vary more by industry - almost every industry hires some folks for corporate finance roles, many CPG / tech firms hire for marketing. Corporate strategy is also very common across multiple industries, and PM roles really primarily just exist in tech. I see a lot of LDPs across industries, including industrials and some of the ones that are more B2B (less marketing here).
Corp dev is a lot less common out of business school, though it is possible. I went the consulting route, but did land one corp dev offer with a Fortune 25 type of firm. Corp dev I think does care more about prior experience than most of these other roles though.
I don't know if any one role at one firm is particularly "easy" (e.g. PM at Amazon only is pretty narrow), but if you pursue any of these aggressively, in the aggregate you're highly likely to land a few roles you're happy with. As far as the most common ones, I'd say it's corporate strategy, PMs (in tech), corporate finance, marketing, and LDPs (the fldps often are the way MBAs start on the corp fin track).
thank you!! this was a very detailed post. appreciate you elaborating on the LDPs.
I had one question about corporate strategy. I heard it's hard to get straight out of an MBA program unless you had previous consulting or finance experience. And most people in f500 corp strat are ex-MBB or tier 2 consultants. Is that true? Do you need to do management consulting before moving to industry for corp strategy? Or do many people go straight from MBA to corpstrat?
Thanks!
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