Inside The Online MBA: The Online MBA & Your Career

Byrne: I believe that one of the less appreciated and unanticipated advantages of many MBA programs is professional development, the chance to introspective about who you are, who you want to be and what it will take. That is much harder to find in an online MBA program. But that’s always been an important part of the Kelley experience.

Johnson: At Kelley, we believe strongly in the personal side of development, not just the academic but the professional and the personal. It not only,  ‘Who do you want to be at Whirlpool or who do you want to be at Rockwell, but who do you want to be? What are you trying to achieve for yourself and what role does your career play in your life?’ I think that philosophy is truly program independent. It’s worth noting that all of our graduate programs, whether online or on campus, is part of my shop. We don’t carve up our programs and treat them as silos.  And all the coaches talk to each other, we work together, we implement that philosophy seamlessly across our different programs, while also having coaches who are dedicated to specific programs. So we’re philosophically consistent but tailored in our approach to any individual student.

We have a five-phase approach to career development for our online MBA program that does look like Me Inc., the name for our career management program in the full-time MBA.  For those who aren’t familiar with that, it’s a two-week-long deep dive into your skills, your interests, your values, your vision, how you make meaning of situations, and how you want to chart your own career path going forward.

With the online program, it begins with the personal inventory which is an assessment of your personality, skills, and values. It helps us answer the question, “Where are you running?” And I like to say everybody at Kelley is running: you’re either running from your last job, or you’re running to your next job. A lot of folks are just trying to get out of the job that they’re in. And part of that initial inventory is understanding why. Is it a motivation issue, an appreciation issue, a skills mismatch, the wrong supervisor, or team dynamics? The personality assessment helps us determine if your personality fits with your job. If you’re not one who’s generally oriented toward detail-oriented work and you’re a CPA, it’s not hard to understand why you’re experiencing some job dissatisfaction. And that can help us figure out what type of jobs we probably want to avoid if you’re interested in making a transition.

That inventory is step number one and it allows us to understand where you are running. Step number two is that intake appointment where you meet with the coach, and the two of you begin to develop a personalized career plan. And then step number three is where you really engage with the curriculum and the resources that we provide. We do have a lot of online resources for our Kelley Direct students, but we also don’t make the assumption that our students only want to engage online. So we’re now offering three dedicated professional development courses through our school, and the expectation is that everybody takes at least one.

We have a six-week course to help somebody who’s a job seeker get market ready. We have a six-week course on how to manage your career, internally, if you’re a navigator looking to move up. And we have a six-week course on how to prepare for a consulting interview that was built by a senior manager at Deloitte. Based on the type of job that you’re trying to go after, we’ve got an option for you. And then the follow-up to that is to begin to execute against your career plan and hopefully begin the process of salary negotiation and evaluating an offer so you can hit the ground running.

Each of those components is delivered to a student when they’re ready. It’s ‘Michael, you tell me where you’re at, and I’ll help figure out what the next step is for you.’ So we really do try to design something that meets a student where they’re at.

Byrne: And when you get a coach like Stephanie or Terry, you keep that coach throughout the program so you’re developing a real relationship?

Bauman: Absolutely. It’s two years now that we’ve been working together and have gotten to know each other really well, where it’s coming to the point that I can tell where she’s going to challenge me before she even does.

Byrne: In the typical residential MBA program, there are things like seminars on MBA jobs in different industries and what they require as well as receptions by companies that come to recruit students. Is there any kind of equivalent in the online space?

Johnson: We do work with our faculty to try to provide some of the industry level and functional level education. So the Kelley Marketing club’s trip to Chicago is one example. That’s actually being done in conjunction with a corporate relations person in our office to help, not only figure out what are the right companies to go to but how do you build a portfolio of experiences that are going to give the broadest view of what marketing looks like. We have, historically, run some virtual networking sessions via a couple of different platforms in consulting and in marketing where we’ve got alum and recruiters from a variety of firms. That works really well, but there isn’t a whole lot of substitute for that face-to-face meeting.

We now have a business development team, with four regional people, one in LA, one in Boston, one in Atlanta, one here in Bloomington who covers the Midwest. And just this week, we’ve been talking about plans for 10 nationwide events where we bring in recruiters, alumni, Kelley Direct students, and in-resident students for networking. That’s something that’s truly unique and tries to close the gap on the face-to-face knowledge or the face-to-face relationship building that I think is so important. You can’t just bring a bunch of companies to Bloomington and say, ‘Get here if you can.’ You have to actually go to where the students are

Byrne: You had some really impressive numbers on how many new jobs that business development team has been able to scout for MBAs, both full time and online.

Johnson: So in just the last four months alone, this team has generated more than 800 new jobs, many at new companies that we did not have any previous relationships with. And they are compensated like a traditional sales force, so they have a bonus structure in place, and the number one driver of their bonus incentive is jobs for the MBA population; in-resident and online. We’ve actually been generating jobs at a two to one clip that would be a better fit for a Kelley Direct student than for an in-resident student. In theory, a Kelley Direct student could start a new job on February 1 or October 1. An online student is really in the experienced hire marketplace, which means we don’t need jobs that only start in June and July and August.

So that year-round calendar flexibility is something that really helps us a lot with our business development efforts. And if I go to a company, like Apple, and they say, ‘Man, we need somebody now, we can’t wait until June.’ My team could say, ‘Well, we actually have a population of students who could do that, in addition to some alums that we can do some outreach to. We have students who’d be qualified for this right now. Let us get that job posting in front of them, we’ll collect some resumes for you.’ It’s improved our ability to deliver on the corporate customer experience as well as meet our students where they’re at.

Byrne: And I’m just going to note, as an aside, there are other schools that may have planted someone in Silicon Valley but they don’t do what your business development team is doing nationwide. Often, they are involved in corralling alumni, and not exclusively devoted to cultivating relationships and scouting opportunities for MBAs.

Johnson: I think it’s really a testament to our dean’s belief in the value of career services and the value of supporting the entire portfolio and not just a select number of programs.

Byrne: Well, we’ve talked a lot about longer-term career outcomes but what about more immediate outcomes. Have the two of you been able to take something that you learned in class and immediately apply it in the job in a way that made a difference in your career?

Bauman: This is actually something that happened very recently. I was in the pricing class while we were evaluating a price increase for all of our products so our trade customers probably weren’t very happy with that situation, but it worked out really well for the Kitchen Aid and Whirlpool team. I would take the class in the evening, and I would learn how to build a new pricing model, and I would apply it the very next day, with regards to the elasticity of demand, break even and sensitivity analysis. It was a capability that we didn’t necessarily have.

Byrne: Divya, how about you?

Venkataraman: My first class was economics, which gave me a really good formal understanding of the things I’ve come to understand about the macro and micro space and the global marketplace that I work in that applied to the product management job I was in at the time. And soon after taking that very first class, I transitioned into a new job function at Rockwell as a technical salesperson, and I was interacting with manufacturers all day long. A plant tour is one of the most insightful meetings you can have with the customer and a panel of representatives from Rockwell and our distributor partners. I learned a lot about operational efficiency questions in my operations management course that I didn’t learn about in engineering school. So it gave me a language and the credibility with the customer, and actually understanding that could drive the desired business outcome. That was tremendous. And the third class in finance was very insightful for me simply because it will help me pivot into the next career move I’m aspiring to.