Post MBA career myths- Part 4: The MBA will give you more career options
This is one of the most enticing thoughts that comes with deciding to do an MBA: that you’ll have your pick of any job or career you want.
You’ve already convinced yourself that you picked the golden ticket to the future. That any employer worth working for will appreciate the MBA and pay handsomely for your experience, expertise and knowledge. That you will undoubtedly do really well at the business school career fairs and you will get flooded with offers from recruiters.
When you graduate, you feel ready to conquer the world. Then you realise: you still haven’t decided what you’re going to do.
By the time I graduated, I actually felt my options had narrowed. Business schools cater mostly for those who want to go into management consultancies, finance and banking or up the corporate ladder. I am sure there were a lot more options but MBAs don’t often see those.
And even if you do see more options, and they all really value people with an MBA, you still can only pick one. In order to pick one, you have to know what you want to do. You have to know what are your selection criteria, otherwise you will make a random choice that most probably did not require the MBA in the first place.
So where do you start?
One of the things I do with my clients is encourage them to be unreasonable when they start thinking about what they want to do. Really dream big. Because at this stage this is less about deciding which option to take and more about what is really important to you. We figure that out first and we include unusual options, too, so they get more of a sense of what is possible. Once we get to the bottom of why those options are attractive for you, once we figure out the WHY, then it’s easier to look at options and evaluate opportunities that can really fulfill that.
It doesn’t matter how many options and opportunities you have. What matters is that you can only commit to one at a time, so you need to know which one will give you a career that makes you feel fulfilled, MBA or not.
If you want to explore what career is possible for you, get in touch.
This is part four of a five part series. Stay tuned for part five which will be tomorrow.
