INTERVIEW
With "The Business Times"
(Singapore)
http://www.businesstimes.com.sg
Full
Interview by Lynn Lee
with
ART's Managing Director on
"Choosing the Right MBA
Programme"
Atlantic
Research Technologies,
L.L.C. (ART), https://www.atlanticresearch.com,
is a global executive search firm, recruiting in the
industrial, high tech and service
sectors, for senior- and
middle-management
positions in general management,
sales and marketing, finance, supply
chain,
manufacturing, IT, and human
resources.
Question 1)
Do all employers look for postgraduate
qualifications? What is the most
preferred qualification?
Answer:
"Corporations typically call us in to
help
them identify people who are already in
the upper management or middle
management ranks. When recruiting these
candidates, most companies,
large and small, Singaporean and
international, usually look first and
foremost at the candidate's employment
experience, and at his or her
achievements and management style. A
person with a truly outstanding
employment record can get a great senior
management job without an MBA
or other advanced degrees, but sometimes
companies might decide that
they only will interview candidates with
MBA's or, if they are looking
at candidates with similar achievements
and abilities, they might give
an edge to the one with the MBA. For
manufacturing, operations or
supply chain jobs, an engineering degree
coupled with an MBA sometimes
is more favorably viewed for management
jobs than master's degrees in
technical fields. In IT, engineering and
R&D, technical master's
and doctorate degrees are highly
regarded, but, in some companies,
technical people with MBA's are often
given top opportunities for
management, even over Ph.D.'s."
Question 2)
Do candidates who have an MBA degree
stand a better chance of being hired?
Answer:
"Candidates with MBA's almost never
suffer by
having an MBA, but it doesn't guarantee
that it will get one the job.
When interviewing for a job that
requires an MBA, it might be
interesting for the candidate to ask the
employer why they think the
MBA is important for the job. Their
answer might then serve as a
springboard for the candidate to feed
back evidence of how indeed she
or he has developed these favored
attributes through business school
training. It might give some
useful insight into the management
style of the company. Some companies
might just see the MBA as a trophy,
while other companies might have very
specific beliefs about the value
of b-school case studies, finance
training, management theory, etc. and
their relevance to the job to be done.
"Throughout the
world, our firm particularly prides
itself
on identifying local, as opposed to
expatriate, senior and middle
managers. Many of our worldwide clients
- Asian, American, European,
Latin American, Middle Eastern and
African - often regard the candidate
with an MBA as a person with a more
"modern" or "American-style"
business outlook, and since this type of
business model is currently in
favor, in Asia, Europe or other regions,
a management candidate having
an MBA might be offered as
evidence of one's commitment to a more
"aggressive" or "world class" management
style. In countries where
paternalistic, old fashioned or
hierarchical business
management styles have dominated, an MBA
can be valuable not only as a
personal window on a different way to do
business, but it might be of
tremendous value in convincing top
employers to consider one seriously
for substantial management
responsibilities.
"There are some
industries and job titles in which not
having an MBA degree will likely keep
one from reaching the highest
ranks. In many large multinationals and
in most high tech startups, it
just seems that very few CFO's do not
have MBA's. And it is very rare
to see a VP of Sales and Marketing at a
large multinational without an
MBA. For the very top corporate
positions at many North American
companies it can be considered a red
mark against a candidate if he or
she does not have an MBA. The same also
was true in the Internet
industry, where dotcom executives having
top MBA's became a tremendous
cliché. The sad irony here is that the
Dotcom Bubble is a great
example where the MBA was used as a
trophy to lure investor confidence
and money, while, at the same time, the
lessons from business school in
creating sound business models seemed to
be ignored in favor of pure
greed. Nowadays the surviving internet
companies are scrutinizing
management candidates far more closely,
and they are more interested in
people whose ideas might bring long
lasting stockholder value, rather
than a "fast buck." They are much more
open now to people without
MBA's, because in that industry, a whole
lot of very well educated
people showed that degrees in themselves
cannot replace solid business
experience and logical judgment."
Question 3)
Does it matter where you received your
MBA
or the duration of your course? Do
employers tend to prefer those who
have MBA's from prestigious
institutions?
Answer:
"Too much depends upon specifics about
the
hiring manager's own background and it
might be difficult to know how
one's MBA is going to be viewed by a
hiring manager or by the various
decision makers at a company. We have
seen all sorts of scenarios. You
might believe that, for example,
employers having top US MBA's
themselves might absolutely want to see
candidates only with MBA's from
those schools. By the "one hires in
one's image" rule, this might be
so, but we have also seen a lot of these
managers look more to the
personality or work experience of the
candidate than the "brand" of MBA
they possess. Perhaps coming from these
"top" schools themselves, they
know first hand that not every one of
their classmates was particularly
smart, practical, or the kind of person
that they would want to work
with. Then there is the type of hiring
manager who is just plain
jealous of the person with the MBA from
the prestigious school and he or
she cannot see beyond his or her own
prejudice in evaluating the pluses
and minuses of the individual.
"Right at this
moment, we are presenting a candidate to
run
a key marketing group for a
multi-billion dollar American
corporation.
She graduated from a leading Asian
university and then went on to a top
US business school for her MBA. But that
is not why they are interested
in her. It is rather that she has many
years' of achievements in their
industry and that she could be an
immediate contributor. The excellent
overview that her business school
training provided her perhaps helped
shape the way that she evaluated certain
business situations and how
she responded to opportunities or
problems that came up in business,
but her success in business is really
because of her mind and innate
management ability and exposures at the
companies where she worked.
"Our
recommendation to people interested in
pursuing
advanced studies is simple: study what
you do well in and do the best
you can, alongside the best students and
professors possible. In our
experience, the people who really do the
best in their fields and who
are given top managerial jobs,
regardless of what schools they
attended, are those who most enjoy their
work. Their enthusiasm and
creativity spurs them toward greatness
and naturally makes them
leaders. If you are a really good
engineer or computer scientist and
love improving your technical knowledge,
go for a technical graduate
degree, and if you are naturally
inclined toward management, your
talents will be recognized at the right
company. If you are in business
and people are telling you that the path
to management is only with an
MBA, don't listen to them, particularly
if you hate statistics,
accounting or management theory. An MBA
alone does not guarantee or
teach anyone to be a good manager. The
companies that we represent on
six continents like people with active
minds and they usually have
programs to encourage people to pursue
higher studies and training, to
better their managerial and technical
knowledge base, but also to keep
these great people happy at the
company."
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