I know: I said I wasn’t going to write any more MBA posts. Still, I keep on hoping that this time it will be OK, last night I attended an event organized by Nanyang Business School. It had been advertised by email some time ago; I hadn’t meant to go, especially as I normally have a martial arts class on Friday nights. In the event, a reminder email came to tell us that “Very limited seats were left” for “this event not to be missed”, which sounded promising, and as it happened I’ve been over-training lately and needed to give my knees a rest. So I went, and paid over my twenty bucks for admission…
The event was titled “Speed Up Your Career Evolution”. There were three speakers, in this order:
- Ms. Jill Lee, Senior Executive Vice-President and CFO, Siemens China;
- Mr. Paul Davies, Regional Business HR Manager, Hewlett Packard Asia;
- Mr. Leonard Yeow, Founder President and CEO, The Eximius Group Pte Ltd (the main speaker).
Now, I have to say: all three speakers were very good, and delivered very interesting and informative presentations that I enjoyed a lot. Leonard Yeow in particular was excellent, and very entertaining. His talk was the most relevant for me as an MBA alumnus; the other two were perhaps targeted more at current course participants. Putting the three together, it was worth going to the event, and the admission fee!
The turnout was OK for a Friday-night event; I didn’t do a headcount, but I would estimate that there between forty and fifty people there. The auditorium was only half full, though: “very limited seats remaining” was, let’s say, testing the boundaries of what that phrase might be expected to mean!
So if the speakers were very good, what made me unhappy about the evening? First of all, it was a little sad that an event with this quality of speaker was organised by the MBA Alumni Association, and not by the Careers Unit. Career support was weak throughout my time in the MBA, and a few things have happened since then to suggest that the school still hasn’t got its act together in this respect; perhaps that’s for another post, though.
The second, and main, reason came during the Q&A session at the end. One of the current participants, an Indian, was concerned about his job search. He described himself as having an IT background (in fact, by the sound of it, pretty deeply technical), and no real managerial experience. He’s applying for entry-level managerial jobs (including with Siemens and HP) and getting nowhere. What, he asked, could he do to help improve his applications?
The response from the participants was unanimous: forget it, no HR manager in their right mind would hire you for a managerial position if you have no experience, MBA or no MBA. They suggested trying to find an alternative entry path into an organisation and then, after a year or two, wangling that into a managerial role. After that, it would be possible to leave and begin a career path as a manager.
I was watching the panel, so I didn’t see the questioner’s face as the answer came, but I can imagine that this was not what he was hoping to hear. Going into a non-managerial post for a couple of years is not going to help him recoup the expense of his degree – and perhaps he could have tried this approach without needing the MBA at all… I can sympathize, because I was in a very similar position – a deep geek hoping to use the MBA to change career path, and I found this out the hard way as well: my job applications to the corporate world went nowhere.
Now, the panel’s response is totally realistic and reasonable, of course. The thing is, how did that participant get so far without knowing it? Like me, he almost certainly went through the MBA application process and interviews being open with the b-school about what he wanted to do – and wasn’t told that it wouldn’t work. Why not? I can think of a few answers to that, and I don’t like any of them.
In my case, I’m luckily pretty resilient. I already had experience of setting up and running my own business; plus, I had a lot of political experience, so I had more under my belt than just my IT work. On top of that, my applications to big-name companies were more to do with being caught up in the general MBA group-think; it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. (What do I really want to do? Heh, I’m working on it; maybe I’ll have more to say in the next few months on the topic!). But, in terms of my post-MBA career, I had to do it all myself; I don’t feel that I got much meaningful help from the B-School.
In any case, that student was the reason I left the evening with a bad taste in my mouth: how can he have committed two years of his life and the cost involved in an MBA without someone having told him as honestly as the panellists did last night that it wouldn’t work?
