'You're buying into an incredibly smart group of people': the enduring pull of the MBA
When Conor O’Shea left the army in 2017, he admits he felt a bit lost. The idea of taking a year out to think about what he really wanted to do was very appealing. He’s now working in Dublin as the EMEA operations lead at Google, after completing a one-year MBA at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. “When you leave the military, you feel a bit useless,” he says. “You always feel like: ‘I have no tangible skills’ – like you’re a bit of a risk. I thought doing an MBA would be a stamp of credibility for me. I’m over the moon to be here in a job I never thought I’d be able to apply for.”
According to the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS), O’Shea is one of more than 61,000 people who study for a postgraduate qualification in business and administrative studies in the UK, accounting for nearly a quarter of all postgraduate degrees. It’s a course that attracts an incredibly international cohort – CABS found nearly seven in 10 graduates are international students from non-EU countries. Of that overall number, 11% will take an MBA. Matt Symonds, director Fortuna Admissions, an MBA consultancy firm, says demand has been increasing over the past two years among applicants for the top UK business schools, including London Business School (LBS), Cambridge Judge, Oxford Saïd, and Manchester. That’s in stark contrast to the US, where schools are struggling to attract students.
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But with fees ranging from £17,500 per year at the University of Glasgow, to £87,500 a year at the London Business School, students will often look for scholarships or loans to help fund the course. The University of Hull’s MBA programme director, Dr Margaret Nicholson, says they’re seeing a growing number of students being sponsored by their employer via the apprenticeship levy. “We’ve got medical practitioners for example, engineers, people in the fire service and police, who’ve evolved into roles where they’re needing management and leadership training,” she says. “Doing the MBA [helps students] learn to think in a different way – it opens you up to possibilities you didn’t know existed. And it all comes from that collaboration and exposure to other people’s points of view.”
The paths MBA graduates take after study are as varied as where they’ve come from. The Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) interviewed almost 6,000 MBA alumni and found them across eight different industries, including consulting, finance, technology and government or non-profit roles. There are some who will return to their employer to progress within the company, or enhance their own career paths in some way; others may look to start their own businesses or take control of the family firm. Approximately one in three are looking for a career change. GMAC found that more than 90% of Fortune Global 100 and 500 companies plan to hire MBA talent this year, and almost all (90%) of MBA alumni say the skills they developed on the programme have advanced their careers. Many talk about the value of a life-long professional network.
At London Business School, Nikki Gupta is part-way through a full time, two-year MBA course, which is due to finish next summer. She’ll then be going to work with Amazon, where she says her pre-MBA salary of £20,000 will be multiplied by five. “This is not something I would ever have had within my reach two years ago,” she adds. “I used to teach A-level maths.”
The impetus to study for an MBA came after she and her co-founder struggled to scale their education technology startup beyond the UK. She was interested in product management and approached a number of people on LinkedIn to ask where her skill gaps were.
“I thought: ‘Would I learn more in two years through the MBA and a couple of internships, or would I learn more from two years in a job?’” she says. “That’s when the decision to do an MBA made sense.” She was lucky enough to receive a £30,000 scholarship, which she describes as a “gamechanger”, and has had family support to cover the rest of the fees. “What you’re buying is membership to an incredibly smart group of people, an education, and a chance to explore different skills you may not have known that you had.”
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MBAs: top tips for choosing where to study
The content of the course
Most MBAs will have similar core modules covering accountancy, marketing, organisational behaviour and HR, and strategic management, but it’s the electives that will really tailor your MBA to your career path.
The cost
Fees for MBAs vary wildly – around £18,000 is typical for a school accredited by the Association of MBAs (AMBA) – but there are grants, scholarships and fellowships on offer. Some of these may be aimed at improving the diversity of the student intake for the course.
The reputation of the school
MBAs are accredited by three bodies – the Association of MBAs, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, and EFMD Quality Improvement System.
Fewer than 100 institutions worldwide are approved by all three (known as triple accreditation). There are also league tables, published by the Financial Times, QS Global, and The Economist. You might also consider the level of access to academic staff with real world experience and the location of the university, which will dictate the connections it has with the local business infrastructure.
The network
Many MBA graduates will point to their newly acquired network as a key benefit of the programme. Students are typically handpicked to ensure a broad range of professions, nationalities and backgrounds. The number of women has been slowly increasing in recent years, hitting 39% across the top business schools in the US, Canada and the UK.
