Tech Hires Surge At Kellogg This Year

www.kellogg.northwestern.edu

www.kellogg.northwestern.edu

MCKINSEY LED MAJOR MBA EMPLOYERS AT KELLOGG FOR THE 11TH TIME IN 12 YEARS

“There’s strong interest in tech but it’s coupled with significant employer demand,” explains Kirkpatrick. “And there is a diversity of jobs they take with small, medium and large companies, from uber to Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn. What we are seeing is that these companies are hiring talent in many different functions from business operations and strategy to product management and product marketing. It’s a wide range of functions and tech also offers a lot of sub-sectors from fintech to e-commerce.”

What didn’t change this year was the Kellogg’s dominance in the prestige consulting industry. Fully a third of this year’s class took jobs in consulting. That’s down two percentage points from last year and five percentage points from the peak of 38% in 2009 after the crash of the economy when consulting firms were among the few companies still in hiring mode. The elite consulting firms have consistently valued the interpersonnel and team-building skills as well as the professional presence of grads at Kellogg, a school that has long been at the forefront of developing those soft skills.

In 11 of the past 12 years, the top employer of Kellogg talent has been McKinsey & Co. This year McKinsey hired 43 members of the Class of 2016, up from 34 a year earlier (see table on following page of the top employers since 2012). In the past dozen years, 539 Kellogg MBAs have been employed by McKinsey. Four of Kellogg’s top five employers this year were prestige consulting outfits. Boston Consulting Group hired 25 Kellogg MBAs, Bain & Co. picked up 24, and Deloitte Consulting brought aboard 21 MBAs.

Consulting also paid the highest median starting salaries of any industry at Kellogg: $145,000, a $5,000 rise over last year’s $140,000 base. Financial services was next at $125,000, followed by technology with starting median salaries of $120,000.

CONSUMER PRODUCTS NOW CLAIMS MORE KELLOGG MBAS THAN FINANCE

The only company to break up the consulting party on Kellogg’s Top Five employer list was Amazon, which has emerged in recent years as the most voracious hirer of top MBA talent in tech. Consumer product and healthcare companies also picked up hiring at Kellogg, which has long had a stellar reputation in marketing. Some 14% of the class accepted jobs with consumer marketing companies, up from 12% a year earlier, while 7% of the graduates were employed by healthcare firms, up from 5% in 2015.

In some cases, there were also big increases here in hiring patterns. Nike was Kellogg’s seventh largest employer this year, right behind Google, hiring 11 MBAs, up from only three in 2015. Anheuser-Busch InBev employed a half dozen Kellogg grads, putting the company just under Goldman Sachs, while S.C. Johnson brought aboard five MBAs. Neither firm made the top employer list last year. Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Adobe and Dell, the latter returning to the top employer ranks after being absent for several years, also were in the mix of major hirers.

The growing presence of the tech industry also mirrors the shift in where Kellogg MBAs are taking their jobs. This year, 26.3% of the class headed out west for employment, up from 21.8% a year earlier. Some 31.4% landed jobs in the midwest, down slightly from 32.8% in 2015, while 18.8% moved to the northeast, up slightly from 17.4%. About 10.7% of the class accepted jobs with companies in the south, up a bit from 9.3% last year.

This year, 25 students launched startups out of the MBA program, the same as last year. Another 14 took full-time positions with startups. Kellogg said that 99.7% of its 653 graduates, a number that includes the school’s two-year, one-year and triple M program, provided data for the 2016 employment report.

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