A Higher Degree of Demand for ‘Techno-MBAs’

Some college students get care packages from Mom. E. Mia Nam got them from the management consulting firms that were vying to hire her.

There was the mug stuffed with coffee and crackers, a gift basket with wine and cheese and a bottle of champagne. The award for originality goes to the firm that sent the 30-year-old Newport Beach woman a flashlight with a map and the message that it hoped she’d find her way to its door. That company, the big management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, took her on a dinner cruise in Newport Harbor after she accepted their lucrative job offer.

“It is amazing,” Nam said. “This is one of the few times you get to feel pampered.”

Nam is one of 43 UC Irvine MBA candidates who, for the first time, also have a specialty in information technology management. It’s a hot job market in general, but demand for these students is sizzling.

Three months before obtaining their master’s degrees in business administration, at least 90% of them have job offers in hand for an average of $84,000 in annual compensation, compared with an average of $67,000 for UCI’s other MBA candidates.

They’re getting signing bonuses of up to $20,000, stock options and promises of future bonuses. Five have packages totaling more than $100,000. One student reported receiving a raise before starting the job because the firm he signed with was worried he’d get better offers.

These students--average age about 28--are headed for management jobs at Fortune 500 companies and consulting firms that are hungry for MBAs who understand the role of technology and how it’s changing the nature of business.

Among the companies recruiting them are the big six accounting firms and major corporations such as Intel Corp., Clorox Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., J.P. Morgan & Co., and Pepsico.

So-called techno-MBAs have been springing up at business schools across the country, and suddenly they are all the rage. UCI’s MBA program, a bit of a backwater until recently, is drawing attention with its cutting-edge approach that blends technology throughout its entire curriculum.

The program has been rated among the nation’s top 20 technology-focused MBA programs last year by U.S. News and World Report and Computerworld magazines.

For the last two years, the UCI students have been immersed in technology. They used laptop computers for everything from personal schedules to class notes. In a special first-of-its-kind lab, they worked with the same software systems used by top corporations.

UCI’s techno-MBAs aren’t “code-spouting freaks,” said David Chia, 23, one of the youngest students in the program. They are future managers “who understand that technology is going to be changing things.”

Next year, UCI plans to extend the program to two-thirds of its MBA class. After that, it will become part of its regular curriculum.

“We feel the marketplace is really validating the concept that we have,” said Bill Armour, the school’s assistant dean.

And how.

“One student said, ‘I just stopped taking phone calls,’ ” said Randy Williams, placement director for UCI’s management school. “That’s so different from three years ago when people said, ‘I’ll take anything, anywhere.’ ”

*

The demand is being driven by companies “who have finally come to understand the true value of information technology as a competitive asset rather than just some tool to automate processes,” said Mark Lush, a technology manager at Deloitte & Touche.

The accounting and consulting firm expects to hire 15 to 20 MBAs from UCI this year. But Lush acknowledged that competition is fierce--to the point where a few students have asked for their entire school costs to be reimbursed.

Suvesh Balasubramanian, 28, a computer science engineer from India who is completing his MBA program this week, learned the virtues of call-waiting. At one point, he had three phone calls at once from firms that were courting him. “They’ll do anything to get you on board,” he said.

He’ll start as a management consultant at the Irvine office of Ernst & Young in May, making $85,000 a year. He received a $20,000 signing bonus.

*

Fellow student Drew Aron said, “I didn’t know how I’d be received, didn’t know if the demand would be there.” So the 31-year-old Irvine man threw his resume into the piles of every consulting firm recruiting on campus.

Now, after receiving three generous offers, he’s got a six-figure job at Coopers & Lybrand in Los Angeles.

“I’m trying not to collect offers anymore,” he said, but the calls keep coming--from Toshiba, Nissan Motor, IBM and others. “People are just falling all over themselves trying to hook you.”

The students say they are trying to keep it all in perspective.

As Chia, who will start at a $60,000-a-year job at Andersen Consulting in El Segundo in August, puts it: “You can’t let it go to your head.”