Why The MBA Is The Right Choice For Career Switchers

DRAMATIC MBA CAREER SWITCHES: A FOOTBALL COACH AND A DRUMMER CHANGE IT UP

Cattani: And integral to the career switching path is a summer internship because the summer internship provides a low risk mechanism for both the company and the student to try a position that he or she may be new to. It’s a limited risk opportunity that lasts between eight and 12 weeks long. About 50% of internships lead to full-time jobs or lead to full-time offers of which about half are accepted. So about 25% of the students enter their second year already knowing where they’re going, while the others continue working on their networking and other skills.

We’ve had some significant career switches in recent years. From the class that recently graduated, we had a student who was a high school math teacher and football coach, came to Kelley, earned his MBA, graduated last May, and he’s now working for Corteva Agriscience in Oregon. Another student who graduated last year was from from Dallas, but she was actually working in Michigan for Fiat Chrysler as a financial analyst. But now after her MBA, she’s with Deloitte as a senior consultant in Chicago. Another student that also just graduated this last May was a drummer.

Byrne: A drummer?

Cattani: Her undergraduate degree was in jazz performance and she was in various positions related to her skills as a drummer. Well, she has graduated with her MBA and she’s now with DuPont as a business development manager in Delaware.

Byrne: That’s a dramatic switch.

Cattani: If we go back a couple of years to students who graduated in the class of 2017, one individual from Oregon who was a scientist, a senior research assistant, came to Kelley and now he’s working at Merrill Lynch in New York City in finance. One other example that I think is interesting is a student who graduated in the class of 2017 and came from New York City where he was a chef. He earned his MBA degree at Kelley, and he’s now a senior analyst for a public retirement system. That’s a pretty dramatic shift as well.

So all of these students have made quite the pivot from one to the other. And some of them have made significant geographic shifts as well, whether it’s going from Texas to Chicago via Bloomington or Oregon to New York or in any number of directions. We gather students from all over the US and we send them all over the US.

Kesner: And if I might add, not everyone joins a corporation. So there is an opportunity at our school to take the entrepreneurial route, and if you do that, you really do need to build some networks and a full time MBA program can help you develop those networks so that you’re ready to make that switch as well. So when you career switch, one might argue coming from a corporate environment into an entrepreneurial environment is a very big one. And we’ve had many instances where that’s happened.

Byrne: Now the things you have to learn in an MBA program to make a successful switch are quite a lot. Many of the people are not only switching industries, they’re switching disciplines. So you have to learn the discipline, you have to learn the structure of an industry, you have to learn the companies in it. You need to understand the roles newly hired MBAs play in those companies? It’s quite an educational process as well, which is why I think a lot of the coaching is instrumental to making this switch. Kelley is one of the few schools, if not the only school that has an entire building now devoted to career development filled with certified coaching professionals.

Kesner: That’s correct. So we really do cocoon the student and provide all of the resources they’re going to need in order to develop those new knowledge sets and then test them out directly. Even our entry point beyond Me, Inc., which is a truly integrated core curriculum that takes the full semester, gives you the sense that functions don’t operate independently. They operate together and it allows students to explore which of those functional areas might be best suited to them. It also helps students fill those gaps where they might not have the critical knowledge that they need. So no one gets through the program without really understanding all the functional areas, how they work together, and then making selections of where they belong.

Cattani: The Academy structure is integral to all of those issues that you raise about having to learn a new discipline, a new industry.

Byrne: A new language, even.

Cattani: So during the first semester when they’re immersed in the core, we carve out these Academy Fridays where they have lots of corporate visitors come in who they talk about the lay of the land, the lay of the industry, what’s a career like in marketing or supply chain or finance. They also spend a week towards the end of October students they go out and visit companies and they see what’s it like to be in those cultures. And then in the spring, as Idie was mentioning, each Academy has experiential learning projects where they are actually working on projects with companies on real problems. They are cutting their teeth on actual problems in industries. The Academy structure is certainly integral part of all of this-

Kesner: And all of this, whether it’s the projects you work on in the Academy, or the internship, gives you stories if you will, so that when you are interviewing full-time, you have something meaningful to talk about. You have real experiences that you can share with the interviewer, to let him or her know that you have had some experiences that are valuable to them, and you can hit the ground running.

Cattani: Another key experiential learning opportunity is with our global program, called GLOBASE for Global Social Enterprise, where the students do learning projects in either Latin America, Africa, or Southeast Asia. And so they’re in teams of five, led by a second-year student who is practicing his or her leadership skills, and they are working with either small companies, nonprofits, or NGOs in a country. So when they are on the job market, they can talk about this experience, actually working with a real organization, and trying to figure out how to improve it.

Byrne: Right. How many of the career switchers, who come to Kelley, know exactly what they want to do when they start the program? And how many of them discover what they want to do while they are in the program?

Cattani: That is an excellent question. I think most of them come in with an idea, but many of them actually change as they go through the program-

Byrne: It’s not as if you have to know exactly what you want to do when you step through the door.

Kesner: In fact, I would encourage students to explore. Because if you have not had the opportunity to really think about your skills, and where you have capabilities, then an MBA program is the perfect place to do that. It is a low-risk environment. If you fail at your first attempt at a project or fail at the first attempt in terms of an initiative that you take on, you have learned some valuable lessons. And that failure is far, far less consequential than if you do that in a job situation.