Mba Job Market Trends

MBA Job Market Trends
Year 2009 was one of the toughest for MBA students. Jobs were scarce and the recruiting process proved to be long and exhausting.

According to a recent San Francisco Business Times article, just 65 percent of graduates from UC Berkley's Haas School of Business had accepted job offers by graduation; now about 90% of the class of 2009 has jobs. Those numbers are unprecedentedly low: in a normal year, nearly 100 percent of the class would have been employed three months after graduation. And Haas is no outlier.

At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, 74% of the graduating class had job offers at graduation and 69% of those offers had accepted those jobs. Three months later, 85% of the class of 2009 was working, and 12 percent said they were entrepreneurs, the newspaper reports.

Nor is a top MB any longer a ticket to being able to simultaneously switch industries and job functions, a major attraction for many prospective MBA students continue applying to these programs. In the San Francisco Business Times article Pulin Sanghvi, assistant dean and director of Stanford’s GSB Career Management Center states, “In a good economy, you can make wild transitions, you can make huge functional and industry shifts at the same time, and the market for talent is so tight that you could get multiple offers even if the jobs are completely misaligned with your previous experience. In this economy, it’s still very possible to make a functional shift. It’s still very possible to make an industry shift. But it’s much, much more difficult to make both at the same time.”

We totally agree. According to a ZoomInterviews.com survey, many class 2009 graduates could not make a desired career switch. Furthermore, a significant number of international students were not able to secure desired jobs in the US and had to return to their home countries.

Despite these difficulties, many MBA programs continue to insist that their value is still high.
If this may be not true for graduates of class 2009 who still are looking for jobs off campus and need to compete in saturated labor market, the outlook for the MBA students who are just starting their MBA may be not as bad.

Recently GMAC, the Graduate Management Admission Council, issued a year-end follow up poll asking recruiters about MBA job market prospects. The results are more encouraging than those from a year before.
70% of companies expect that their business will improve in 2010. While 65% of employers continued to hire MBAs in 2009, this percentage is expected to grow to 69% this year.

In 2010, all candidates, and especially recent graduates, should expect that salaries will most likely remain at 2009 levels, as reported by about half (45% to 58%) of employers participating in the poll.

Regardless of a more optimistic business forecast for 2010, uncertainty about hiring plans and compensation for next year remain high. Approximately 16 percent to 26 percent of participating employers did not know their 2010 hiring plans for various candidate types. Of those who planned to hire, 10 to 21 percent did not know how many candidates would be hired, and 9 to 16 percent did not know how starting salaries for 2010 would compare to last year’s.

What are our conclusions? While 70% of companies will hire, this also means that the remaining 30% still will not. It's a good idea for those who plan to start their MBA to take a closer look at this data and dig deeper to understand which industries and companies are planning to expand and which less so. Solid research is a key in any business decision and your career is no different in this respect, especially in such unprecedented times as today.

By: Stefani Parks

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