Despite cracking the top B-schools, many MBAs end up dissatisfied after graduating. A competitive exam won't be enough to get you ahead in your career after MBA; you must learn specific skills.
Moreover, there are three types of MBAs that I have discovered who are undoubtedly going to do well in their career after MBA.
Continue reading if you are an MBA aspirant, a student, or a recent graduate since it could change your life
Qualities required to be Successful after an MBA
Does an MBA from a top B-school guarantee success?
Surely not.
It does give you exposure to many great opportunities, but the probability of converting these opportunities depends on your skills; you need to acquire specific skills to maximize your career opportunities after an MBA.
The book DEEP WORK by Cal Newport talks about maximizing your productivity. I read it the other day, and I liked how it talks about three types of people who would reach greater heights in life considering the economic and technological factors.
MBA students can perfectly apply this notion to maximize their career outcomes.
The three types of people who are going to be a sure shot success in their career after an MBA are :
- People who are great with machines
- People who are masters in their domain
- People who 'own' and manage the first two types of people, i.e., the capitalists
People who are great with machines:
As the industry evolves with the advancement of technology, the importance of acquiring high-end core technical skills has dramatically increased.
Organizations at every step of their functioning process face challenges due to the lack of technological innovations, and the Pandemic has pushed it further.
Therefore, I always push on the fact that MBAs, future business leaders need to learn Digital Skills.
The MBAs should have two crucial digital skills -Digital Marketing and Marketing Analytics.
Within Marketing Analytics as a Digital skill:
Data analysis – As an MBA graduate, when you go into the industry, you are likely to manage enormous amounts of data like forecasting sales, analyzing marketing patterns, etc.
It would not only help if you had a firm hold on data analytics tools such as Tableau, Microsoft Excel, etc., but it would also make you stand apart and be good at your job.
Programming languages- Although you don't need to master programming languages like Python, you need to have a basic understanding of them.
I talk about three levels of analytics in many of my videos, and it could very well be that your job role doesn't require you to be highly proficient with coding.
But as you can see, the world is moving towards it, and someday, not in the distant future, this would very well become hygiene for most high-growth jobs.
When it comes to Digital Marketing as a Digital skill:
Digital skills like SEO (Search engine optimization), marketing analytics, Facebook Ads, etc., can act as assets to fetch you, clients, from all over the globe for their marketing strategies.
Other skills include project management, presentation, and design, etc.
If you are comfortable handling the above core technological skills, you are already ahead of your competitors.
No, this might not be the correct way to present this. It would seem to an audience that we have randomly picked up some skills and have put them out there.
Start by saying that MBAs should have Digital skills ---- two imp ones --- DM and Marketing analytics.
Then within Marketing Analytics, the most sophisticated data analytics is done by programming languages like Python and R and then writing about them.
People who are masters in their domain:
The world is moving from a traditional economy to a gig economy. Organizations hire employees for shorter periods for specific projects in a gig economy instead of hiring them for full-time job roles.
In this way, employers can choose the appropriate employees for their different projects for only a particular duration of time.
Also, the employees, instead of being restricted to the same monotonous job profile and pay, get to work on a variety of projects and get paid good money for the jobs they have deliberately developed their skills in
In such circumstances, to maximize your career opportunities after an MBA, you need to be the superstar or specialist in your field.
Your expertise will be valued by multiple organizations in your area and worldwide.
The best part is, you would no longer be dependent on the college placements as you would be able to fetch the most sought-after job roles on your own.
Talking about placements, the construct of the "best placements" might soon get replaced by "best opportunities."
And to fetch the best opportunities, you need to follow the universally accepted principle of learn, do and teach.
If you follow this principle, you will consume what is being taught to you and utilize the knowledge by applying it.
After this, let's talk about the third type of person who will be successful in life after completing an MBA.
People who have the capital:
These are the people who bring together the two types of people I mentioned above, i.e., the ones great with machines and the ones who are specialists in their field.
These are the capitalists who are the people who own the projects, and they have the required capital to invest in technology and human resources.
You must be wondering if you could arrange such capital being an MBA student. Instead of just consuming knowledge, you need to learn to apply that somewhere,i.e., you need to have a mindset of creation.
There is a universally accepted principle of Learn-Do-Teach. As soon as you become proficient in your field, it will help you become a practitioner.
Start a blog (highly recommended for MBA students) where you can run your marketing experiments. Managing the blog would teach you valuable digital skills such as SEO, Facebook ads, etc., attracting clients worldwide.
Moreover, you can also find co-founders and start your venture at business schools. Airbnb, Facebook, Microsoft, and Rent the Runway (Harvard Business School), Warby Parker (Wharton School), GrubHub (University of Chicago), Uber (Stanford), and Akamai (MIT) were a few examples of companies launched on business school campuses.
Please take it as motivation and start now.
Conclusion
I am sure by now you have had your questions about succeeding after an MBA answered.
I described three types of people who would succeed in their careers after receiving an MBA in my article. Congratulations if you belong to one of these three categories; if not, you should work on acquiring them.
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