MBA Gradutes turn to nontraditional fields for job satisfaction, personal growth

By JEFFREY STEELE, Special Advertising Sections Writer

Earning an MBA (master of business administration) degree has always been a great way to accumulate beaucoup bucks. What it hasn’t always been about is “leaving legacies and touching lives.”according to MBA holders and professors.

That’s begun to change, and with it has come new career opportunities for students, new views of attractive career options among prospective MBA recipients, and a wholesale restructuring of MBA curricula.

According to top-ranking administrators of Southern California MBA programs, today’s graduates are being sought by such traditional employers as banks, lenders, investment houses and insurers. They also are being recruited for marketing, general management and consulting jobs.

But increasingly, MBA graduates are discovering abundant opportunities in fields where their skills have seldom been used. Many of these opportunities are in the nonprofit arena, where recipients of MBAs are working in environmental management and charities, for instance.

Spurred by the newly revived emphasis on business ethics, many students are actively seeking careers apart from those of their predecessors. One such MBA holder is Jennifer Wolf, director of operations at the Institute for Conflict Management in Santa Monica.

“Some of my colleagues from business school have gone into traditional careers, and are very happy with them,” she said. “However, I see another group pursuing their own business ideas, some of which diverge from a traditional path.”

California Charter Schools Assn. finance director Adam Miller, another nontraditionalist, added: “Some people explore nonprofit, others explore areas such as renewable energy or other businesses with positive social impact. … I think a lot of people from my generation are looking for deeper meaning or deeper fulfillment from work. They really want to know the time they’re spending each day is going toward a greater good.”

“A lot of people are looking to bring their business skills to socially responsible companies and nonprofits — organizations, for instance, focused on the environment,” said second-year USC Marshall School of Business student Kimberly Storin of Manhattan Beach.

Yash Gupta, dean of the USC Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles, put it simply: “They’re thinking more about leaving legacies and touching lives.”

Those entering fields to which MBA graduates have traditionally gravitated are finding greater opportunities in financial institutions, financial services and consulting than MBA degree holders have in the last several years, Gupta said. The real surprise has been consulting, which took a hit in recent years, but “has come back and come back strong,” he said.

At the Paul Merage School of Business at the UC Irvine, MBA Career Center director Randy Williams also reports finance and consulting jobs are being dangled in front of soon-to-be MBA holders.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the Enron, Worldcom and Tyco accounting scandals, has jump started consulting job growth.

Such firms as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte & Touche are seeking MBA holders to assist client firms in dealing with compliance issues relating to Sarbanes-Oxley.

Among the best news greeting this year’s crop of MBA graduates is that the Southern California job market has become more diverse, Williams said.

“In the 1990s, we were heavily reliant on real estate and defense,” he said. “Today, it’s across the board: real estate, biotechs and technology, defense industry, entertainment. We’re seeing growth in hiring in all those industries.”

New Horizons for MBAs

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations — historically not a career path pursued by MBA recipients — are beckoning to growing numbers of them.

“A lot of students are beginning to feel they need some balance in their lives, that money is not necessarily everything, and doing some good for society as a whole is important,” Gupta said.

Within nonprofit groups, MBA holders are accepting operations analyst, financial analyst and marketing manager positions, among others, he added.

“The jobs, content wise, may be similar, but the environment is different,” he said.

Another nontraditional career field for today’s MBA student is government, particularly the federal government. Faced with a looming exodus of general managers and operations executives as the Baby Boomers retire, the federal government has launched a vigorous outreach for people with MBAs, Williams said. He points to the Central Intelligence Agency’s quest for analysts with economic backgrounds and foreign language skills as one example.

MBA Curricula Changing

In response to the accounting scandals that have rocked business, a renewed emphasis is being placed on ethics in all parts of the MBA curricula, including practicum, Gupta said.

But this is hardly the only change affecting the education that prospective MBAs receive.

“Compared with 10 years ago, it’s hard to distinguish where the business school ends and where the business community begins,” said Andrew Policano, dean of the Paul Merage School of Business at UCI. MBA programs aren’t just serving up theoretical educations these days; they’re increasingly sending teams of students to area companies to work right alongside managers.

“We’re dealing with the companies every day,” Policano said.

“Whatever challenge they’re facing is part of our curriculum. It’s in real time, because the companies are presenting us some of the things they’re working on, and [Paul Merage School of Business students] begin to work on the same issues,” he said.

MBA educations used to be a kind of piecemeal system, Gupta said. Students learned a little accounting, a little economics, some finance and marketing. It was up to the student to forge the connection. Today, he said, these separate components are being integrated within MBA curricula.

“The other thing was there was not as much a connection with the reality,” he said. “We didn’t open the hatch and say, ‘let’s observe the world.’ We did not give them the experiential learning to the extent an MBA program should.”

That’s now changed, and appropriately so.

“There’s tremendous competition among full-time MBA programs for students,” Gupta said. “Once we had a monopoly in the United States for MBAs, and people came from all over the world. But now, we’re seeing competitors where they formerly didn’t exist.”

Jeffrey Steele is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

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