Five Clues That Business School is for You
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If you’re an ambitious, career-minded person eager to advance professionally, chances are that you’ve considered business school.
Maybe you have a colleague with an MBA degree, or a business leader you follow on Twitter has been posting about their alma mater. Maybe you’ve simply been reading around the idea of business school and are curious about what it can do for you.
It can be difficult to know if it’s the right time for you to go to graduate business school or if it’s even the right option when balanced against your career goals and personal priorities.
Here are 5 clues that graduate business school could be right for you:
1. You’re feeling restless or trapped in your current role
Many people can identify with the feeling of being trapped in a dead-end job.
Even if you like the industry you’re in or the company you work for, you might feel like you’re not as fulfilled as you once were.
If this is the case, you could be one of the 13 percent of business school applicants called “Career Revitalizers”: people who are looking to reinvent themselves and bring some excitement back into their working lives.
Business school offers a valuable opportunity to pause and re-evaluate your career while building your competencies so that you can make the changes you need.
Are you a Career Revitalizer? Find out with our quiz.
2. You’re concerned that you don’t have all the skills you need for your dream career
“Skills Upgraders” make up the same proportion of graduate business school applicants as Career Revitalizers, and it’s no mystery why.
Business schools are an obvious place to go if you want to round out your skillset to become a better manager. This is perhaps particularly true of a generalist degree like the MBA, which aims to cover all bases when it comes to leadership skills.
However, you don’t have to only be looking at MBA programs if it’s upskilling you’re after—there’s a world of specialized master’s degrees out there, too, which can deliver training on specific skills such as Data Analytics.
Read more: What Jobs Require a Specialized Business Master’s Degree?
3. You want to switch industries but don’t know where to start
Whether you want to make a move from sales into tech or perhaps hang up your finance hat and go into social enterprise, switching industries is an attractive option for many people.
But it can seem like an impossible task to convince a company in another sector that you’re up to the challenge, especially if you’ve only ever had experience of one industry.
A graduate business degree can offer a way to smooth this transition. If you have a specific industry in mind, you can take modules which focus on related subjects, attend career networking events in that sector, and apply to MBA internships that would provide you with the relevant experience. In fact, seven in ten full-time MBA grads agree that they could not have gotten their current jobs without their degree.
4. You want to move your career abroad
Business education is a global endeavor with thousands of business programs on offer at schools around the world. For people who want to move their careers abroad, business education is a good option. Graduate business degrees are versatile and in demand almost everywhere , giving grads the opportunity to move around the globe. It also helps that schools around the world have their own connections to employers and knowledge of how to get hired in their home countries should that be your ultimate goal.
It’s no wonder that Global Strivers—candidates who want to pursue international exposure and move their careers abroad—make up 14 percent of graduate management education applicants.
Read more: Benefits of Studying Abroad
5. You want to start your own business but keep putting it off
We all have a pipe dream that we keep putting off until we have more time, or more knowledge, or more money.
If you have a business idea that you secretly suspect is genius, but you haven’t yet set the wheels in motion for making it a reality, it could be a sign that you’re ready for an MBA.
Many business schools offer entrepreneurship-focused modules if not whole program tracks, with startup incubators and accelerators on campus. You could meet your future business partner and find investors through your MBA—one in eight business school alumni entrepreneurs partnered with a classmate to start their business.
As with any of these career goals, if you’re passionate and driven, you’d probably reach your goal eventually anyway; but business school is full of helping hands, and if you choose wisely, it could help you accelerate your career. Want to keep exploring how a graduate business education could help you advance your career goals? It’s time to create an mba.com account.