Job search for MBA students - impact of economic crisis

During my visits to various business schools in the UK/Western Europe and talks with/to MBA students, I am constantly amazed by the naivity they display towards securing a job after completion of their MBA program. While the MBA is supposed to make these students a manager/leader of business, they do not seem to take the same rigorous approach in managing their job search and careers. This seems to be especially true of international students viz students who enrol on an MBA program in the UK/Europe, but who have no past experience (work or otherwise) in these countries.

While these students will engage in applying rigorous tools and methodologies in solving a complex business problem, they adopt a very simplistic approach when looking for a job. This simplistic approach can be summed up as 'I have paid huge money to get into this MBA program and the school will automatically find me a job that I want'.

Even during the best of boom years, the above approach worked only for the very top elite schools who had established corporate contacts that would conduct campus placements. Over the past few years, even these elite schools encourage their students to do their own job search as campus visits by recruiters have started declining for a variety of reasons. For the rest of the B schools, campus placement was not a serious option even during the best of times. These schools have small MBA class size and large non-MBA programs, thereby, making the investments in MBA careers services an impossible option. In the current scenario, campus placement for such B schools is unthinkable, especially if the school has no careers services department for MBAs. Despite these home truths, the MBA students at these schools act as if a job offer is to be expected in the same post as the MBA program admissions offer.

My message to such students is simple but blunt - no B school has ever guaranteed a job to its students. Own job search by students (where students look for jobs on their own with some advice/support from school career services and alumni) has always been a primary way of finding jobs after MBA and if anything, this will only increase in the future. The students, especially from smaller B schools, therefore, need to develop separate skills, and more importantly, positive attitude, for managing own job searches while still studying on the program. My work with B schools in the UK focusses on training current students (and especially international students) in this area but the students will only be doing themselves a favour by acknowledging this bitter truth. A change in attitude is urgently required if the proportion of MBA students landing a job within 3 months of completion of the program is to go up.