Inside The Online MBA: The Online MBA & Your Career

A Kelley Direct AGILE global immersion trip in Vietnam

Byrne: Now, you are going to be the beneficiary of a major change in the curriculum here that doubles the number of electives you can take. What I want to ask both of you is, to what extent have you been able to tailor or customize the online MBA experience to your own aspirations and goals?

Bauman: When you start, the core courses truly build a foundation that helps you gain a little bit of confidence in yourself and builds up some competency, especially for someone like myself coming from engineering. So with that, I found a passion for economics, so I’ve tailored many of my electives to econometrics, price modeling, and pricing courses. And I still have two electives left, so I think I’m looking forward to taking advantage of those in the next couple of months here. But I think because I was able to understand that foundation, it really helped direct me to where I wanted to use my electives.

Venkataraman: I’ve been able to take one class at a time, as opposed to two, as a part-time MBA student, which has been really great to enable me to keep my sanity and maintain my work drive. And I’m finally at the point now where I can take some electives, and I’m realizing what I like and what I don’t like. Through Kelley Connect Week, I found a passion for strategy and business management.

Byrne: Does career advising help shape a student’s curriculum after the core?

Johnson: All the coaches on our team are not just career coaches. They’re actually certified executive coaches, or they’re almost done with their certification to become an executive coach. And that mindset is different because it’s not just about getting your resume ready or doing a mock interview or updating your LinkedIn profile. It actually cuts to the heart of, ‘Who are you? Who do you want to be? Where do you find your state of flow when you’re at work? Where do you find your tension and frustration?’

It’s not a natural assumption for a career coach to believe that someone’s going to light up around economics. But an executive coach, by definition, isn’t cheering for an outcome. We’re cheering for a satisfaction. And so, if we notice that Michael is excited by economics; that’s where the push comes in. We’ll say, “Wow, I noticed that you’re lighting up in this area, what does this mean to you? Why does this excite you? How can Whirlpool support you in this area? What would that look like? What keeps you from going after that, and have you brought that up with your academic advisor? Have you considered other courses and other ways to apply this?’ And those questions allow us to have better internal conversations about how to support a student but allows a student to have better conversations with their academic advisor on their own terms, and within their own company about their career plans.

Byrne: So let me play the role of a skeptic for a moment. A lot of people out there who are in the consideration phase for an MBA but they’re drawn back by some natural skepticism about the degree. They worried about the costs, the ROI, whether there are already too many MBAs in the workplace. What do you two think about that?

Bauman: Well I think it starts off with why do you want to get your MBA in the first place. If you’re looking for a piece of paper that says I have my MBA, then you might be right, you might not be getting the return on investment. But with an online MBA program, you control your destiny. The fact of the matter is, if you do the bare minimum, you’re probably going to get the bare minimum benefit from it. So, if you walk into it saying, ‘I want to do this because I want to develop new skills, I want to build my network, and I see this as a vehicle to grow my career,’ then you can figure out how to move from A to B.

Venkataraman: I will say people who are in business management functions that I aspire to be in don’t always have an MBA. But 10 or 15 years from now when I’m vying for, maybe a general manager position, I know all my competitors will have MBAs. That’s just the nature of it and not to have one would put me at a disadvantage, not only from what I’m able to share with the company but also at a personal disadvantage to be able to secure the job.

Johnson: Most of the students in our program want to be a business unit leader, they want to be a country president, they want to be a C-level executive. And I think what you have to bear in mind is there’s a limit to the number of actual assignments you can have that are cross-functional in nature within your firm. If you start in finance, you’re going to do a series of finance roles and maybe you get a development opportunity in operations,  but 80% to 85% of your experience is going to be financial. But if you’re the CEO, you’re the highest level generalist within the firm, and you have to know how to talk about marketing, supply chain, and human capital. So if you aspire to have a general management career path, you have to augment your corporate experience with something outside your firm that gives you the ability to have these conversations.

In my opinion, that’s an MBA. It’s not a specialized master’s degree. While I have no problems with specialized masters, they’re, by definition, focused on one area. But an MBA’s not, and so Michael may or may not ever do a role in human resources, but if he’s had a couple of classes in human capital, he at least knows the right questions to ask. And that’s not something he’s necessarily going to get from Whirlpool unless he chooses to do some shadow assignments or something.

I feel like it’s a signal about who you are, as an individual, but I think it closes a very important developmental gap for anybody who sees himself as a general manager within the firm at some point in their career.

Byrne: When you get an online MBA, you don’t put on your LinkedIn profile or your resume that it’s an online degree, right?

Johnson: Right. It’s a Kelley MBA. I think it’s an important side note that corporate America has a significantly greater acceptance of the online MBA. My team, 10 years ago, talking with companies would still think about the online MBA as being an inferior degree. And these days, you walk in the room and we’re like, ‘Here’s a portfolio of programs.’ And nobody flinches, they’re like, ‘Great, we need high caliber talent to start in October?’ The resistance isn’t there anymore. So, yes, the resume and LinkedIn profile look the same, but if it didn’t, companies aren’t even hesitating; they recognize this as a deep, really resourceful pool of talent for which they’d be silly not to recruit. In fact, so many organizations sponsor students in our program: Whirlpool, Rockwell, Google, Procter & Gamble have high potential people who are in our program right now.

Byrne: So, Michael, what’s been the most impactful course you’ve had in the online program?

Bauman: I would probably have to say the pricing course because I was able to immediately apply it. But the Kelley Connect weeks were extremely impactful. You are immediately thrown into a real-life situation, and the companies that I’ve had the opportunity to work with have totally opened their doors to us. They shared financial information, they shared strategic information, and they were truly grateful for any insights or ideas that we could share with them. So being able to do this crash course of, call it go to market strategy, call it business implementation within six, seven days. And then months later, seeing your ideas actually implemented in these companies, that’s extremely impactful.

Byrne: What did your live case at Kelley Connect involve?

Bauman: My first was with Blooming Foods, which is a local organic co-op grocery store right here in Bloomington. They were worried about Whole Foods moving in and we’re going to compete for a share of the same customer. So we, basically, evaluated their current state. And that’s where I was saying and we had the opportunity to go to their stores and look on their shelves, and touch their products and interact with their team and their customers. We also had the opportunity to look at their financials and understand what products were driving their profit. The analysis helped us recognize what their strengths and weaknesses were, how we could capitalize on their strengths, and how we can improve their weaknesses. We presented to a team of professors here at Kelley, and then if you were selected to move on, you presented to the leadership team of Blooming Foods.

Johnson: So they were so good, they scared Whole Foods from even coming into the market.

Venkataraman:  My live case was on the Happy Horizons Trust, a nonprofit organization located in India that provides education to young girls in the state of Bahar, which has a heartbreaking illiteracy rate, and a particularly heartbreaking percentage of young girls married off very early, and never having the opportunity to meet their potential. We helped that organization’s CEO, who was in town with us for a solid week, with a strategy to essentially get more funding.

Byrne: In a residential program, corporate recruiters come to campus and they interview people. In an online environment, that can’t really happen. So for a career switcher, is there a substitute?

Johnson: The way that we think about this is we put the customer needs first, and then we worry about the process second. We do have national employment outcomes and national relationships, and we target our students in our online program who are spread all around the country. So if I’ve got somebody who’s in San Francisco, who really wants to stay on the West Coast between the Bay Area and Portland, our job is to facilitate corporate opportunities there from a recruiting standpoint, which can exist either from our internal corporate relations team of leveraging existing relationships with companies like Amazon and Microsoft, or our business development rep in Los Angeles, who would go out and find new relationships for us. Those opportunities get posted on a job board that our students have access to and their coaches are alerted to the fact these jobs are now available. The coaches work directly with the students to make sure that they apply for those. We batch the resumes and provide them to the companies, and then the companies choose to interview the students. They’ll do phone interviews, Zoom interviews, they could even do in-person interviews-

Does that preclude an online student from coming to Bloomington to interview with a company on campus? Absolutely not, for the right situation. Had, say, Divya decided ‘I really want to make a move into finance. I’m very interested in leaving Rockwell. I noticed that Microsoft has a finance role available and I’d like to make myself eligible.’ We have a process to help her do that. It happens rarely because, in most situations, folks like where they live or they’re operating on a timeline that’s different than on-campus recruiting for an in-residence program.

Byrne: I want to end the panel the way I ended the previous two panels. What advice would you have to your former self, when you were considering whether to do an MBA?

Venkataraman: I would say, network as much as you can. It’s such an overloaded or overused term. And what I mean is, you might have meaningful connections with a few people, but for each of those people maybe six other people that could give you advice. Learn as much as you can from people so that you can prevent yourself from making a mission-critical mistake. And be very intentional about the program you choose and the people it can allow you to connect with.

Byrne: So make a really informed choice for yourself. What about rankings, Michael? Did you consult them? We should point out that Kelley’s online MBA was just recently ranked first by U.S. News.

Bauman: Reputation is a very big thing. And schools like Kelley get that reputation for a reason because they’ve produced results. And so it absolutely went into my decision, and I’m happy to say I haven’t been led astray.

Johnson: Students need to make an informed choice. I’m really proud of what we’ve done in career services. And I would say, whether you’re a career navigator or a career switcher, I invite you to compare my office and our program to all the other ones that are out there, and I think you’re going to like what you see at Kelley the best. I think we’re doing this as well as can possibly be done right now, and even at that, I think we can keep doing it better and better going forward. So, shop around and then I think you’re going to like what you see here Kelly.

Byrne: Thanks, everyone.

Inside The Online MBA is sponsored by Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business

THE COMPLETE INSIDE THE ONLINE MBA SERIES

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