AMES, Iowa -- Results of a recent survey by Training the Street, a leading corporate training provider for Wall Street firms and top-tier business schools, found that the vast majority of MBA graduates are still receiving competitive job offers, despite their increasing concerns about employment prospects. The new president of the MBA Career Services Council (MBACSC) says MBA graduates should remain optimistic.
Mark Peterson, director of Iowa State University's MBA/Graduate Business Career Services, was recently elected president of MBACSC, the global professional organization for the university MBA career services industry and corporate MBA recruiters. He reports that while the economic downturn had slowed MBA employment, recruiting by industry has increased in each of the last three years. And that's not going to change this year.
"All the surveys suggest that as we move through the rest of 2012, MBA recruiting will be up anywhere from 7, 8 to 10 percent above what it was a year ago," Peterson said. "I have not seen a survey this year that has indicated any kind of decrease in MBA recruitment.
"The value of the MBA is as strong as it's ever been in terms of both the programs that offer the degree as well as the industries and the companies that hire," he said. "The thing about MBA graduates is that they can go into positions that go beyond the scope of just completing specific tasks. What they bring to the table is the ability to integrate strategy across the company or department and apply strategic thought to those specific functions in their department, which adds value far beyond just doing a list of job description items."
Iowa State among MBA placement leaders
Among the 135 business schools that reported 2011 graduates' employment data to U.S. News & World Report, 57.7 percent of graduates were employed at graduation. Iowa State had 96.7 percent of its 2011 graduates report employment within three months after graduation -- ranking the university third for a second straight year on U.S. News & World Report's list of schools with the highest job placement rates for full-time MBA graduates.
Peterson says that the Iowa State MBA program has consistently placed at least 95 percent of its graduates within three months of graduation, and he projects that will happen again this year. He sees Iowa State's focus on technology and business ethics as key.
"We're seeing a strong focus on technology, or business ethics, as being real important to employers who hire our grads. Our efforts in those regards are really paying off," Peterson said.
"We tend to attract here a pretty high percentage of students who have technical backgrounds, more than most others in the region, or anywhere. The MBA's an ideal fit for those candidates and our companies [employers] see that," he continued. "Our graduates come in with the technical knowledge to do some specific thing, but then they have the strategic thought and problem solving that allows them to work beyond that technical area they've been trained in previously."
The same can't be said for all MBA program across the country. Peterson says some programs that were built to serve the financial sector have had to adapt.
"There are some sectors where employment was hurt more than others over the last several years -- primarily some of the areas of finance, such as investment banking and big financial service companies," he said. "There are some jobs that were lost over those few years of the downturn that are probably never going to come back. And there are some MBA programs strongly aligned with those types of companies. So some schools have been forced to regroup in that regard."
Keeping a global eye
And as MBA programs adjust to future demands, they need to have an eye to the increasingly global marketplace, too.
"It's always been that a certain portion of the international MBA students who came to the U.S. wanted to stay here and work after graduation, and the majority still do. But increasingly every year, many are saying, 'When I graduate I want to go back to my country and work,'" Peterson said. "You know salaries are coming up in many of the Asian countries and in some countries, they aren't too different from what many of the MBA employers pay here in the U.S.
"We have been working hard here to add global elements to our curriculum," he continued. "Each year, we now have an international trip for students at the end of the school year and their participation in that has been increasing in recent years."
That Iowa State MBA trip was to China this spring. Peterson says students visited companies in a number of different cities and got a good taste for what's going on within the country.