Employers Say MBAs Delusional About Abilities

Jeff Kavanaugh

“YOU NEED TO GET STUFF DONE”

Based on Kavanaugh’s findings, you could argue that employers are Mars and students are Venus, out of step with each other in both their perceptions and priorities. Does that mean business students are too insulated? Too coddled? Too cocky? Kavanaugh, an employer himself, doesn’t mince words in the answer.

“Here’s the Problem: We like to get warm and fuzzy and sing Kumbaya and all that. If all you do is put post-it pads on the wall or get along and collaborate, you self-actualize. Trouble is, you have to get stuff done. You need that bias for action and work ethic, that practical experience and ability to quickly relate. You can talk about Millennial vs. the older generations. I don’t think it’s that. A lot of these folks are coming out of college paid a lot of money to go there. The college sold them on how great it was and how bulletproof they’d be when they’re done.  There is a bias coming out — maybe overconfidence —but you’ve been shaped by this.

Kavanaugh has encountered this dynamic more times than he cares to remember as a manager. “When you peel it back, it’s not quite as pretty. I’ve had to do a lot of remedial up training, even for a Harvard business grad (that I love), but there was a fair amount of stuff that we had to go through in their first year.”

NOT JUST STUDENTS: RECRUITERS AND SCHOOLS DIFFER ON WHAT NEEDS TO IMPROVE

Recruiters and students aren’t the only ones who are at odds. Take recruiters and career center leaders. When Kavanaugh posed the question of what one area they would choose to improve students’ career readiness, he was blindsided by the biggest surprise of the survey. Across seven categories, the parties were nearly polar opposites. Not surprisingly, nearly 40% of career center respondents chose career management skills for improvement…against roughly 1% of recruiters. However, this was balanced by practical and real world experience, which recruiters favored by a nearly equal ratio. In between, recruiters highlighted critical thinking and work ethic to a greater degree, while career professionals pushed soft skills and technology. Overall, creativity was the one area where the parties found common ground, as each gave it a 3% pittance.

“The biggest difference was the gap between the universities and hiring managers,” Kavanaugh notes. “It was the idea of whether their people were ready to survive and excel. The career center folks said absolutely. The employers said no, they are not ready to excel coming out of college. That was a big surprise for me because I thought the students might have a bias, but there wouldn’t be that big of a gap between employers and the universities.”

The concept of critical thinking, which produced some of the widest divides among students, employers, and career center professionals, was also eye-opening to Kavanaugh. “I hadn’t thought of critical thinking as a phrase. I’ve heard it become so much more part of the vocabulary in the last few years. It seems to have dawned on people that it is a foundational skill that many students have lacked coming out of college. There is an awareness now. Question is, how do you do it? Do you solve it with a $100 million dollar interactive lab? Is it experiential sessions with design thinking, role models and an innovator start up approach? Or is it the hard core Wharton approach? It’s an important question for every college to answer because in a world of open online courses, some schools aren’t going to survive if they don’t have a good way of delivering these things.”

STUDY AUTHOR TEACHES, RECRUITS, AND MANAGES BUSINESS STUDENTS

You could describe Kavanaugh as the business equivalent to a triple threat, with a career that spans work as a consultant, recruiter, and professor. Owner of an MBA from the University of North Texas and a Six Sigma Black Belt, Kavanaugh steeled his prodigious work ethic with early morning wake ups and late evening chores while growing up on an Indiana farm. Over his career, he has worked as a partner at Grant Thornton, a vice president at Inforte (now Business & Decision Group), and a director at PeopleSoft (Oracle). For the past dozen years, he has served as a vice president and senior partner at Infosys, where he has trained hundreds of consultants before being tapped to head campus recruiting.

Over his career, Kavanaugh has met with students and administrators at the major schools, clicking off Harvard, Princeton, Texas, and UCLA among others. Seeing a need and impressed by his work, the Jindal School invited him to design a course to help their students balance their quantitative smarts with the ability to think critically and relate personally. This resulted in Developing Customer Insights, a tour de force course that he describes as a critical and creative thinking “toolkit” for advancing professionally. In particular, the course examines how to frame and present ideas to everyone from senior executives to glue employees working three levels down.

During the course, interacting with students ignited a curiosity about where graduates and recruiters view job readiness differently. As a practitioner who’d guided graduates through consulting’s apprenticeship model, Kavanaugh says the question hit home for him. Even more, he couldn’t find research on the subject while he was writing his book on consulting foundations.  Since his work centered him at the intersection where schools, students, and employers meet, Kavanaugh decided to take the survey on as a passion project outside of Infosys and Jindal. In the process, he chose to eschew anecdotes in favor of a fact-based net promoter model to clearly demarcate where students needed to “future-proof their careers.”