THE BEECHMONT CREST CAREER GUIDE:
SURVIVING AND THRIVING IN THE CORPORATE JUNGLE
Chapter 1: What do Employers Want?
MBAs have felt the pain, too
You might be tempted to conclude that the technical fields are especially prone to radical employment cycles, because they are so intimately connected with specific technologies. But computer programmers and engineers are not the only ones who are vulnerable to the shifting sands of supply and demand. Supply and demand hits everyone--even MBAs.
The MBA became a hot degree in the early 1980s, when investment bankers and stock brokers hired them in droves to sell bonds and orchestrate mergers. The demand for MBAs soon spread beyond the financial industry. By the late 1980s, there was a common belief that a manager with an MBA could step into any business and run it effectively using universally applicable management and finance skills.
The value of the MBA degree peaked during the dotcom era, when management consulting projects and IPOs flourished. However, this boom period for the MBA sowed the seeds of the degree’s subsequent implosion. The high demand for MBAs prompted more universities to start MBA programs. Many of these universities began bending over backwards to make the pursuit of an MBA more convenient. Launching a trend that others were soon to follow, Phoenix University—a private sector player in the education field—even began making the degree program available online.
As supply increases, demand invariably decreases. The MBA was once limited to a small, fairly elite group of people who had attended a small, fairly elite group of schools. Now practically every university had an MBA program; and the credential was appearing on a lot more of the resumes that landed on the human resources manager’s desk.
Moreover, MBAs found themselves in competition with less educated rivals. During the height of the dotcom era, some consulting firms could not find MBA candidates to fill analyst positions, so they began hiring professionals with four-year degrees to do the same jobs. The consulting firms frequently found that a non-MBA could be trained to do the MBA’s job with a bit of extra training. These non-MBA candidates could also be hired at lower salaries.
Looking to the future: the target is still moving
You have now crossed off nuclear and aerospace engineering from your list of future career choices, and you’ve decided to delay B-school until you see how the market goes. Your next question would probably be: based on the current data, what field is the next “sure thing?”
For most of the post-dotcom era, the answers were: education, retail, and health care. Not so fast. An article in the October 24, 2004 issue of BusinessWeek (“Jobs: The Lull will Linger,” by Michael J. Mandel) throws some cold water on the immediate prospects for these fields, as well. The education boom of the 1990s, it seems, was buoyed by a growth in K-12 enrollments which has slowed due to new population trends. The anticipated growth in retail employment never materialized due to industry consolidations and the efficiency gains realized by online retailers. Expansion is still expected in the health care; but health care sector job growth rates have yet to match the pace of the 1990s.
Copyright 2006 Beechmont Crest Publishing