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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