As you apply to MBA programs, you need to think about your work experience and how it fits into your overall story. Work experience is important because of what it reveals about you with respect to your character, maturity level, and abilities. Even if your GPA and GMAT/GRE scores are spectacular, your work experience still needs to impress the admissions committee.
Post-college employment reveals you have “real-world” experience in taking direction, meeting deadlines, assuming responsibility, and working in teams, all of which are highly relevant in a program where group projects are the norm. Developing a baseline track record in your field also gives you industry knowledge and the ability to contribute insights to class discussions. Finally, recruiters prefer MBAs who have work experience.
What follows are some thoughts on how admissions committees view different types of work experience and how you might want to frame your work experience in your MBA application.
Traditional work experience
You might have worked in marketing but not at Procter & Gamble, worked in banking but not at Goldman Sachs, or worked in technology but not at Google. Will your experience at a modest, relatively unknown company count as much to the admissions committees as that of applicants who have worked for brands with caché?
Fear not! The quality of your work is much more important than whether you’ve been employed at a name-brand institution.
Brand experience can be a bonus.
Experience with a brand-name firm might give you an edge, at least on the surface, especially if you are an international candidate looking for a job in the United States. For example, the adcoms are familiar with the typical career path at organizations such as Infosys, Google, Goldman Sachs, and Bloomberg Financial, so they will understand that you were a small fish in a large pond. They will appreciate that you had to work harder to stand out, but they will also look for signs of your talent.
Advancement in large companies is often slow, because such firms are highly structured and bureaucratic, with less room for employees to dazzle their supervisors with distinctive skills and abilities. If your talents were recognized, and you were given a project that would normally be assigned to someone above your pay grade – or if you were fast-tracked for a promotion – this will add stature to your application. Additionally, the fact that a large company with a valued brand name hired you in the first place is an indication that you probably possess at least some of the qualities and skills that your MBA program is looking for.
Even at big-name companies, the substance of your work is still the most important factor.
There are a few things adcoms want to see to verify that your experience within an organization is strong.
Longevity
If you were employed at a brand-name firm for less than one year, the adcom might have concerns that you did not thrive in that work environment. On the other hand, if you were (or have been) employed at such a company for two or more years, that duration signals competence, persistence, and hard work.
Promotions
Were you promoted, or did you otherwise earn increased responsibilities? If so, ensure that any promotions are apparent on your resume, even if you haven’t been in your most senior position for long. Regardless of the company, those boosts are proof that you are considered highly capable by management and therefore have a great future ahead of you.
Movement
If you have more than one brand name on your resume, that is a strong signal that you were able to successfully transition from one world-class firm to another – or perhaps were poached.
Insight
Working at a major company provides an additional benefit: an adcom will see that you have experienced the inner workings of an organization that is best in class and will therefore be able to provide valuable perspectives in class discussions. Top companies have done something right to earn their reputations, and you have used and internalized techniques and practices that have enabled their growth to the top.
For all these reasons, experience working with A-list firms can give you an edge in the initial review process. However, what really matters is the substance of your work rather than where you performed it.
Adcoms seek students with as wide a range of experiences as possible, especially experiences that are relevant to an MBA curriculum. When faculty teach a particular subject and students have related real-world experience, the lessons come to life. This means that the skills and knowledge you gained from significant projects you managed from start to finish matter a great deal – involvement with strategic initiatives matters. You don’t need to have been part of a multimillion-dollar deal to gain strong leadership and management skills.
Small projects can shine, too!
Even small projects that you “own” can be extremely valuable in providing expertise in particular areas. As you advance in your career, always be on the lookout for projects that allow you to take on a significant leadership role and provide you with a degree of autonomy.
Make the most of your resume real estate.
On your resume, you need to condense notable achievements down to just one bullet point each and make every bullet point as impactful as possible. For example, “Led a team of eight to cut supply chain costs by 20% by strategically repurposing older machines.” This example shows leadership, strategic thinking, and quantifiable results – all really important stuff! This is what adcoms want to see. It doesn’t matter if the project size was $10,000 or $1,000,000, or whether it was done at Boeing or Jane’s Jewelry Creations. What matters is that you provided significant results to your company.
Can you show increasing responsibility?
In addition to looking for real-world experience that you can share in the classroom, adcoms look for upward mobility. If you have a track record of promotions, your mobility will be immediately obvious on a resume. If your promotions have been quick because of extenuating circumstances, use the optional essay to explain the specifics.
Even if you don’t have such growth, you can still employ thoughtful wording to showcase how your responsibilities have increased over time: “Rewarded with project management of X following the successful implementation of social media planning schedule.” Essays also offer a place to highlight forward momentum, depending on the topic. Being trusted with greater responsibilities is the clearest signal of strong work experience you can provide for MBA programs. It shows that you have what it takes to succeed both in the program and in your career.
What about nontraditional work experience?
Applicants with nontraditional work experience often worry about whether their experiences will be considered relevant in an MBA classroom. I have even heard this from doctors, lawyers, military officers, and other people with impressive accomplishments. Believe it or not, the less traditional one’s work experience, the more an adcom might be interested!
When putting together a cohort, the adcom strives to make it as diverse as possible, in every way they can – job function, industry, culture, and so on. Imagine if a class was made up of only finance people! Or IT engineers! How rich would the discussion be across courses? Not very! Individuals coming from a non-business background are assumed to have approached issues and problems with a different perspective and set of priorities that might allow for additional learning opportunities for their classmates – and possibly even the faculty! That’s why schools are delighted by nontraditional applicants, and you can be assured that your application will get noticed.
However, as a nontraditional applicant, you will need to have two things solidly in your profile to be seriously considered for admission:
Evidence of quant skills
You need to have a top-notch GMAT or GRE score and/or stellar grades in a few courses that indicate your ability to successfully manage the quant work (e.g., statistics, calculus) of a demanding MBA program
Because your undergrad coursework might not be directly relatable to a business school’s curriculum, the school needs assurance that you will be able to handle the academic demands of the MBA program. If quant courses are missing from your transcript (and you don’t knock the GMAT or GRE out of the park), you should consider taking a “calculus for business” or statistics class at a local community college or online — and aim to earn a letter grade of B or better to alleviate any concern.
A solid reason for needing an MBA
Believe it or not, there are serial degree seekers out there. Your reason for pursuing an MBA will most likely not be obvious based on your previous work experience, so you must do an outstanding job of presenting your career goals and objectives. Why is an MBA necessary to get you where you want to go?
A nontraditional background can give you a leg up with an admissions committee. But once you have their attention, you’ve got to make your case for acceptance with an impressive application. You’ll need to convince the adcom that you will thrive in their program and require the education it provides to achieve your dreams.
Does entrepreneurship count as work experience?
Yes! If you launched an entrepreneurial venture or joined a start-up, you will have the opportunity to show how you survived and perhaps even thrived in those risky, exciting, uncharted waters. In a small company, you would have had more occasions to display your adaptability and versatility. You probably also handled a wider variety of roles and had more responsibility with less supervision.
Most applicants with these experiences have learned invaluable lessons on a faster track than if they had worked in established firms. Even if their ventures were short-lived, they wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. Not only did they have to toggle among many disparate kinds of tasks, ranging from sales to public relations to product design, but they also learned – sometimes the hard way – fundamental rules of business planning and formation.
If you write about being an entrepreneur, however, you will have to demonstrate that this is not a euphemism for “unemployed.” Your business might or might not have succeeded, but showing how you planned for it and executed that plan will speak volumes about you. You can write about how you strategized, determined the need in the market for your product or service, and employed a logical sequence of steps to launch and manage your enterprise. If you are leaving your own venture to go to business school, share what will happen to your organization while you are in the MBA program. Who will take on your responsibilities?
Presenting self-employment experience on a resume
Creating a resume as a self-employed individual presents some challenges. If you already have an established business, some of this information is superfluous, but if you have been doing contract work, there are details to manage beyond the summary of the work you have been doing.
Company name
If you own an established business, you probably already have a company name, but if you are doing freelance work or contract consulting, you might not. You should consider creating a purposeful company name that helps the reader understand that you are indeed self-employed. It could be something as simple as “John Smith Media Consulting” or “E-Commerce Branding Solutions.”
Job title
If you are doing contract work or other freelancing, avoid putting “Self-employed” or “Freelancer” as your title. Consider “CEO/Founder,” or if that is overreach, something like “Senior Consultant” or “Senior Engineer.” Choose something that is as close as possible to what your title would be if you were employed by someone else, but without sounding inflated or self-congratulatory. If you have an existing business, the “CEO/Founder” designation is most likely an accurate representation.
Describing your work experience
If you run a business that offers tangible goods or services, mapping out your experience should be fairly straightforward. For example, if you are a contractor, you should discuss projects you have worked on for various firms or individuals, listing details and successes of those projects as much as you can without violating any confidentiality agreements. Hopefully, you have some good, quantifiable results that you can point to. Here are some examples of how you could present projects:
“Overhauled payment system for $XM automotive parts manufacturer, resulting in 20% reduction of A/P.”
“Researched and presented findings on a nonprofit’s proposed expansion into a new territory. Findings were also shared with donors, who then funded 100% of the expansion.”
“Designed website and implemented social media strategy for eight-member start-up in the energy industry.”
How much work experience for MBA programs is enough? How much is too much?
Most applicants to two-year, full-time MBA programs have three to eight years of work experience. If you have been working longer than that, you should probably consider an EMBA or part-time program, or another option geared for more experienced professionals.
Unless a program actively courts younger applicants, two years of work experience is usually the minimum you will need to prove that you can contribute to and benefit from the program.
How do you handle being laid off?
With the recent waves of layoffs in the tech industry, you might wonder how an adcom will view applicants who have been let go in this way. Business can be messy, especially during economic uncertainty, and the adcoms understand this. In your resume – and possibly the optional essay – convey what you have been doing to advance your skills while you have been out of work.
Bottom Line
What matters most to MBA adcoms is not the quantity of work experience you have or whether you gained that experience in a small start-up or at Google, it’s how much you have contributed and what impact you have had. Whatever your work experience has been since you graduated from college, if you can prove that your focus, determination, collegiality, initiative, and maturity paved the way for you to make an impact, you are several steps closer to securing a seat in your chosen MBA class.
Explaining the kind of work experience you have and your career progression in a meaningful way will help the adcoms get to know you better. Furthermore, even two years of full-time, professional employment can lend credibility and substance to your stated career goals, because those goals will clearly be based on real-world business experience that has tested, refined, and clarified them and your roadmap to achieve them, rather than on a youthful, fuzzy, naive dream.
As the former executive director of admissions at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School and assistant dean of admissions at Georgetown’s McDonough School and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School, Kelly Wilson has 23 years’ experience overseeing admissions committees and has reviewed more than 38,000 applications for the MBA and master’s programs in management of information systems, computational finance, business analytics, and product management. Want Kelly to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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