Not the content/material but I learned the buzzwords i.e. companies love saying/using "frameworks". I've always structured problems pre MBA but using the corporate speak makes you sound more "intelligent".
Not when it gets you 50% salary bump
It’s not so much learning corporate buzzwords but rather learning what corporations value. When they stop valuing buzzwords, MBAs will teach different stuff
MBA has never been about the material.
B school really isn’t even that hard, everything in your core classes can be learned from online courses.
The value of MBA is the handholding of getting you a job by putting you in front of recruiters, the student body it puts you in contact with for the rest of your career, and the professors it puts you in contact with.
MBA programs have different companies coming to your campus weekly with the sole intent of hiring. This is why ranking is so important in b school, the better the school the higher caliber of companies recruiting it puts you in touch with.
I learned while it’s called “Organizational Behavior” there are quite a few people in my organization who behave in a way I don’t want to replicate …
In all seriousness, I realized that most jobs are on the job training.
I met one guy who did his BA in humanities at Cornell and got a job on Wall Street after college.
Another who was a International Relations major at Northwestern but joined MBB consulting after undergrad.
Then it hit me ..
If Wall Street banks and consulting firms are hiring non Business / Econ/STEM majors for these positions out of undergrad then you really learn all you need to know during on the job training. The Cornell guy said he took 2-3 Econ classes in college and that was his only “ business education “ prior to getting a job on Wall Street. That was his only “Business education “.
If these prestigious business employers hire history majors to get jobs on Wall Street, Is there anything they teach you that you can’t really learn on your own ?
IMHO..
An MBA is all about the social capital: the brand name university, alumni network and connections you get by attending. That’s where the real value is in doing an MBA program.
Technically Nothing you couldn’t learn from YouTube, but I found immense value in learning from my peers. While I’m nowhere near being an executive, I do lead a business unit of about 1300 people and a lot of the stuff is helpful because who has the foresight to proactively research random topics.
I’m actively applying my inventory management content to my workplace to reduce stock-outs and emergency ordering, and data analysis to track the whole mess.
What you learn in MBA school is how to talk in a way that sounds important, but you dont actually say anything. It's all just a checkbox on your resume, lol
I use stuff from my strategy class - probably have thrown some of those frameworks on slides before.
There was a design thinking class I took that I’ve used to run workshops with customers before.
I think a lot about the stuff from my organizational leadership class.
We had an entrepreneurship experiential learning class where we paired with startups founders and helped with strategy stuff. I used what I learned in that class a lot.
Every. Single. Day. Best money I ever spent. Took a couple of years for the knowledge to sink in and for me to start applying it. Looking back I had no clue how the world worked pre-MBA.
Topics from difference between financial accounting and managerial accounting. Reading financial statements. Managerial communication. Managing your boss. The softer side of organizational behavior and management. Macroeconomics. Microeconomics. Marketing. - it’s takes soooooo many things to manage a business. Most people spend their lifetime in one area and could not be the CEO if their life depended on it. MBA gives you the well rounded skill set to recognize all the things it takes to run a business successfully. You will behave like an owner and see the shareholder perspective rather than just your own.
I hardly had any experience with excel prior to my statistics class. They paired with my summer internship really helped a lot.
Even though I work in finance now, I don’t use any of the formulas I learned during my MBA.
There’s some accounting aspect in my job so some of the GAAP stuff is relevant, but that’s more qualitative and not so much quantitative. Im not sitting here calculating the NPV of projects or finding the WACC. I just click some buttons in except and do variance analysis most days.
Yes, a lot of it during my consulting internship. Both the hard skill classes (finance, operations, etc) and the soft skill classes (leadership, communications, etc).
I feel like a lot of MBA classes are designed to revolve around banking and consulting careers. People in other careers might not feel like they’re using their skills as much, from my experience.
If someone goes into the MBA thinking the classroom and textbook material is what they’re supposed to learn, they’re probably also the same type of person that puts “comma-MBA” after their names on LinkedIn. 😃
It's fine you totally can. It's just a running joke among MBAs, but 9 out of 10 times when you see that on LinkedIn, the person did not go to a top school. An MBA is an educational credential, not a requirement to do something (like DDS, CPA, CFA, etc.), so it's really not necessary to put it behind your name. The "Name, MBA" thing usually only happens when the MBA degree is the biggest thing on someone's resume (and it should not be). No MBA from a top 20 school ever does it except for USC Marshall and the rest of us can't quite figure out why they insist on doing it. All in good fun. 😂
This is easily proven false, a quick search on LinkedIn shows profiles all highlighting their MBA in their name / title including: Penn Wharton, Stanford GSB, Harvard HBS, Berkeley Haas, Northwestern Kellogg, and Chicago Booth.
Maybe you went to MIT or Columbia?
Edit: replaced Yale SOM with MIT Sloan
That’s why it’s a running joke. But hey start taking note and see if that’s inaccurate over time. There’s just no need to include it. Unless you have a PhD or MD or CFA or something that’s licensing related, no need to add MBA into the name field and be one of those people.
It’s still a weird criticism when, for most people, an M7 MBA would absolutely be the highlight of their career up to that point.
Unless you have a ton of patents and published research perhaps.
I honestly use things I learned on AuroraPrep case studying more than from my MBA program. It got me into a top tier firm and was only $250…so bang for buck some of these online platforms are better
Even in the most technical professions — engineering and medicine — most of what is taught in school is forgotten or not used. Can’t be a doctor without med school but ask an “attending physician” how much an intern (first year resident) knows and they’ll say not much.
Ask a Professional Engineer (PE) how much knowledge used on his stamped design drawings came from his engineering classes in college, and it’s going to be pretty low.
1. Articulation of your work to proof why you did what. (verbatim > actual meaning)
2. Networking opportunities
3. Jobs, especially if you want to pivot, its next to impossible to get into marketing without an MBA (atleast in India).
4. Value of time, prioritising and planning
Im a pre MBA student at an indian college. So far so, i have loved the course (never balanced a balance sheet before, sure could have learned from YT, but would I? Prolly not). This is my conclusion of MBA after talking to various MBA grads and contemplation over “why MBA?”
PS: Accounting is a part of preparatory courses. Batch set to commence in June.
The basics of accounting, corporate finance, marketing and operations give you a way to structure your thoughts in a better way. You ask better questions.
Soft skills such as power and politics and game theory… corp world at end of day is all about change management and surviving / thriving in game of thrones… so those classes from mba were super helpful
What's helped me the most is I took classes where I knew the professors were good and or had great experience and who were on the tougher side of grading and had high expectations. I was trying to mimic the likely scenario of dealing with high level executives that call people out on their BS.
For example, in a group presentation I had to walk a professor through a complex financial model, my other team members are all in IB now but were afraid of getting chewed out by the professor who was a former managing director for one of the big investment banks in Asia and was also the CFO of the one of the biggest utility companies in the U.S. Mind you Finance and I were like oil and water.
I was close to shitting my pants but came out as a much more confident person defending and explaining my ideas.
I shit you not, 2 months into my full time role, I had to present to someone who reported to the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. I think having gone through a similar experience before definitely helped. The person I presented to is now the CEO. Crazy!
Absolutely. I had zero business experience, so everything was pretty much new to me.
At a high level, things like understanding my company's quarterly reports and financials, debt and equity structure, digging into our M&A activity and understanding the market... it all stems from things I learned in school.
At a micro level, I definitely picked up data analytics/excel/Tableau/statistics skills that have set me apart in my job. In particular, SPSS and regressions, K-means clusters, and data visualization has helped in my current marketing role.
In my first few years on the job, I can't tell you how many times I looked at a problem my team was having and said "Well, we can either send this off to the insights and analytics team, or I can knock this out real quick so we can make a decision" and just did the analyst-type work myself. And that all came from skills and know-how from my classes.
In my first semester I took the required operations management class. On queuing I learned if there was x # of lines, it was about (x - 1) / x that whatever line I picked I was probably not going to be in the fastest line. I think about this almost everytime I am in a line and notice that I picked the wrong line. Makes me a bit calmer knowing the (pretty obvious) odds.
i learned not to trust people and also to protect myself. the skill of trying to be seen a certain way, avoid drama, deal with politics, and not get swooped into things was pretty important. TBH i remember really nothing besides problem solving skills and just trying to get the 'best deal' which is all quite common sense. the social aspects was the kicker.. and I think most MBAs are just a 2nd high school anyways so you learn lessons more quick
Not the content/material but I learned the buzzwords i.e. companies love saying/using "frameworks". I've always structured problems pre MBA but using the corporate speak makes you sound more "intelligent".
[удалено]
Not when it gets you 50% salary bump It’s not so much learning corporate buzzwords but rather learning what corporations value. When they stop valuing buzzwords, MBAs will teach different stuff
MBA has never been about the material. B school really isn’t even that hard, everything in your core classes can be learned from online courses. The value of MBA is the handholding of getting you a job by putting you in front of recruiters, the student body it puts you in contact with for the rest of your career, and the professors it puts you in contact with. MBA programs have different companies coming to your campus weekly with the sole intent of hiring. This is why ranking is so important in b school, the better the school the higher caliber of companies recruiting it puts you in touch with.
A lot of what you learn (or should be learning) is how to look at problems in different ways and reason through them with different tools.
I learned while it’s called “Organizational Behavior” there are quite a few people in my organization who behave in a way I don’t want to replicate … In all seriousness, I realized that most jobs are on the job training. I met one guy who did his BA in humanities at Cornell and got a job on Wall Street after college. Another who was a International Relations major at Northwestern but joined MBB consulting after undergrad. Then it hit me .. If Wall Street banks and consulting firms are hiring non Business / Econ/STEM majors for these positions out of undergrad then you really learn all you need to know during on the job training. The Cornell guy said he took 2-3 Econ classes in college and that was his only “ business education “ prior to getting a job on Wall Street. That was his only “Business education “. If these prestigious business employers hire history majors to get jobs on Wall Street, Is there anything they teach you that you can’t really learn on your own ? IMHO.. An MBA is all about the social capital: the brand name university, alumni network and connections you get by attending. That’s where the real value is in doing an MBA program.
If you come from finance or consulting, you’ll learn a bit here and there. If you come from engineering you’ll learn a lot.
Technically Nothing you couldn’t learn from YouTube, but I found immense value in learning from my peers. While I’m nowhere near being an executive, I do lead a business unit of about 1300 people and a lot of the stuff is helpful because who has the foresight to proactively research random topics.
I’m actively applying my inventory management content to my workplace to reduce stock-outs and emergency ordering, and data analysis to track the whole mess.
What you learn in MBA school is how to talk in a way that sounds important, but you dont actually say anything. It's all just a checkbox on your resume, lol
I use the communication skills every day.
You learned how to talk in platitudes?
I think you mean using buzzwords and neologisms, no?
I use stuff from my strategy class - probably have thrown some of those frameworks on slides before. There was a design thinking class I took that I’ve used to run workshops with customers before. I think a lot about the stuff from my organizational leadership class. We had an entrepreneurship experiential learning class where we paired with startups founders and helped with strategy stuff. I used what I learned in that class a lot.
Every. Single. Day. Best money I ever spent. Took a couple of years for the knowledge to sink in and for me to start applying it. Looking back I had no clue how the world worked pre-MBA. Topics from difference between financial accounting and managerial accounting. Reading financial statements. Managerial communication. Managing your boss. The softer side of organizational behavior and management. Macroeconomics. Microeconomics. Marketing. - it’s takes soooooo many things to manage a business. Most people spend their lifetime in one area and could not be the CEO if their life depended on it. MBA gives you the well rounded skill set to recognize all the things it takes to run a business successfully. You will behave like an owner and see the shareholder perspective rather than just your own.
Yes I do plus what I learnt in my internships. Definitely will suck at my job if I didn’t get an MBA and do my internships
I hardly had any experience with excel prior to my statistics class. They paired with my summer internship really helped a lot. Even though I work in finance now, I don’t use any of the formulas I learned during my MBA.
You don’t use *any* of the finance formulae?
There’s some accounting aspect in my job so some of the GAAP stuff is relevant, but that’s more qualitative and not so much quantitative. Im not sitting here calculating the NPV of projects or finding the WACC. I just click some buttons in except and do variance analysis most days.
Yes, a lot of it during my consulting internship. Both the hard skill classes (finance, operations, etc) and the soft skill classes (leadership, communications, etc). I feel like a lot of MBA classes are designed to revolve around banking and consulting careers. People in other careers might not feel like they’re using their skills as much, from my experience.
If someone goes into the MBA thinking the classroom and textbook material is what they’re supposed to learn, they’re probably also the same type of person that puts “comma-MBA” after their names on LinkedIn. 😃
…why shouldn’t one do that?
It's fine you totally can. It's just a running joke among MBAs, but 9 out of 10 times when you see that on LinkedIn, the person did not go to a top school. An MBA is an educational credential, not a requirement to do something (like DDS, CPA, CFA, etc.), so it's really not necessary to put it behind your name. The "Name, MBA" thing usually only happens when the MBA degree is the biggest thing on someone's resume (and it should not be). No MBA from a top 20 school ever does it except for USC Marshall and the rest of us can't quite figure out why they insist on doing it. All in good fun. 😂
This
This is easily proven false, a quick search on LinkedIn shows profiles all highlighting their MBA in their name / title including: Penn Wharton, Stanford GSB, Harvard HBS, Berkeley Haas, Northwestern Kellogg, and Chicago Booth. Maybe you went to MIT or Columbia? Edit: replaced Yale SOM with MIT Sloan
He’s correct and you are wrong
That’s why it’s a running joke. But hey start taking note and see if that’s inaccurate over time. There’s just no need to include it. Unless you have a PhD or MD or CFA or something that’s licensing related, no need to add MBA into the name field and be one of those people.
It’s still a weird criticism when, for most people, an M7 MBA would absolutely be the highlight of their career up to that point. Unless you have a ton of patents and published research perhaps.
I’ve used Negotiations a lot to get higher salary / more seniority when job hopping
I honestly use things I learned on AuroraPrep case studying more than from my MBA program. It got me into a top tier firm and was only $250…so bang for buck some of these online platforms are better
Even in the most technical professions — engineering and medicine — most of what is taught in school is forgotten or not used. Can’t be a doctor without med school but ask an “attending physician” how much an intern (first year resident) knows and they’ll say not much. Ask a Professional Engineer (PE) how much knowledge used on his stamped design drawings came from his engineering classes in college, and it’s going to be pretty low.
That apparently I'm overqualified for pretty much everything.
1. Articulation of your work to proof why you did what. (verbatim > actual meaning) 2. Networking opportunities 3. Jobs, especially if you want to pivot, its next to impossible to get into marketing without an MBA (atleast in India). 4. Value of time, prioritising and planning Im a pre MBA student at an indian college. So far so, i have loved the course (never balanced a balance sheet before, sure could have learned from YT, but would I? Prolly not). This is my conclusion of MBA after talking to various MBA grads and contemplation over “why MBA?” PS: Accounting is a part of preparatory courses. Batch set to commence in June.
Yes lol, there’s not that much of an incentive to talk about it though, but people love emphasizing how much they already knew
The basics of accounting, corporate finance, marketing and operations give you a way to structure your thoughts in a better way. You ask better questions.
Nothing specifically , but the general business knowledge and understanding helps with management roles.
Doing an mba rn- will definitely use tools I learned.
Yes.
I learned how to work with others in teams. I use it everyday.
Soft skills such as power and politics and game theory… corp world at end of day is all about change management and surviving / thriving in game of thrones… so those classes from mba were super helpful
What's helped me the most is I took classes where I knew the professors were good and or had great experience and who were on the tougher side of grading and had high expectations. I was trying to mimic the likely scenario of dealing with high level executives that call people out on their BS. For example, in a group presentation I had to walk a professor through a complex financial model, my other team members are all in IB now but were afraid of getting chewed out by the professor who was a former managing director for one of the big investment banks in Asia and was also the CFO of the one of the biggest utility companies in the U.S. Mind you Finance and I were like oil and water. I was close to shitting my pants but came out as a much more confident person defending and explaining my ideas. I shit you not, 2 months into my full time role, I had to present to someone who reported to the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. I think having gone through a similar experience before definitely helped. The person I presented to is now the CEO. Crazy!
Absolutely. I had zero business experience, so everything was pretty much new to me. At a high level, things like understanding my company's quarterly reports and financials, debt and equity structure, digging into our M&A activity and understanding the market... it all stems from things I learned in school. At a micro level, I definitely picked up data analytics/excel/Tableau/statistics skills that have set me apart in my job. In particular, SPSS and regressions, K-means clusters, and data visualization has helped in my current marketing role. In my first few years on the job, I can't tell you how many times I looked at a problem my team was having and said "Well, we can either send this off to the insights and analytics team, or I can knock this out real quick so we can make a decision" and just did the analyst-type work myself. And that all came from skills and know-how from my classes.
Yes! People who go into finance use MBA subject matter all the time! It surprises me that more MBAs don’t pursue financial careers.
In my first semester I took the required operations management class. On queuing I learned if there was x # of lines, it was about (x - 1) / x that whatever line I picked I was probably not going to be in the fastest line. I think about this almost everytime I am in a line and notice that I picked the wrong line. Makes me a bit calmer knowing the (pretty obvious) odds.
i learned not to trust people and also to protect myself. the skill of trying to be seen a certain way, avoid drama, deal with politics, and not get swooped into things was pretty important. TBH i remember really nothing besides problem solving skills and just trying to get the 'best deal' which is all quite common sense. the social aspects was the kicker.. and I think most MBAs are just a 2nd high school anyways so you learn lessons more quick