WHAT DO EMPLOYERS SAY?

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 538.

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None more so than top management consulting firm McKinsey. Of its 260 London consultants, around half have MBAs. The company actively recruits 30-40 people a year from major business schools, such as INSEAD in France, Harvard and Stanford in the US, and London Business School and Manchester in the UK. It spends around £1 million a year sponsoring its 25-30 graduate recruits to complete full-time MBAs at the same institutions.

“Essentially we see an MBA as a short cut to busi­ness experience”, says Julian Seaward, head of recruit­ment for McKinsey's London Office. “It enriches peo­ple with a lot of management theory, and perhaps a bit of jargon thrown in.”

However, the company still prefers MBAs gained abroad. With a longer established reputation in the US, business schools there still have the edge in attracting candidates, while INSEAD has positioned itself as an international school with a cosmopolitan faculty and student body.

“The networking and experience of other cultures is very useful as a lot of our clients are global”, says Seaward.

Nevertheless, McKinsey is actively raising its profile over here with a recently-launched scheme offer­ing external candidates sponsorship through a United Kingdom MBA with a guaranteed job afterwards.

With a £50,000 Harvard MBA, McKinsey knows how attractive its staff are to other employers. Those who wish to leave within two years have to repay their sponsorship, but Seaward believes the staff develop­ment strategy has a good return rate. “We look for peo­ple to develop a long-term career with us, not just an analyst job for a couple of years, and reward high achievers with good salaries and opportunities.”

Chairman Nigel Hewlett believes the MBA's formal education in analytical skills and constructing solu­tions provides a very useful training, producing people who have a good overview of business issues rather than a concern for details.

The company is currently undertaking an evalua­tion of the best UK schools in which to invest their bursary. With the recent big increase in the number of institutions offering MBAs, Hewlett is concerned that not all MBAs are equal. “There are clear differences in terms of quality.”

But not every company favours MBAs. In the early 1990s, Shell actually abandoned its own MBA course at Henley when it realised it was not producing gradu­ates who fitted the jobs for which they were destined.

“We're slightly ambivalent towards MBAs,” says Andy Gibb, Shell's head of global recruitment. “A lot of Shell's work is technical, while MBAs from leading schools are pitched at a more strategic level. It can be frustrating and unnecessary to be trained for strategic thinking, when the job you're moving into is not really suited to that. We would rather focus them on techni­cal leadership.”

Companies like chartered accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers take a more middle-of-the-road approach. While it does not actively target MBAs or recruit them directly from business schools, a grow­ing proportion of its senior consultants have got them, and it is increasingly on the lookout for MBA graduates.

“Our business is changing from audit and tax man­agement more into consultancy roles,” says UK recruitment partner Keith Bell. “MBAs do bring a breadth of vision to the business problem rather than a narrow viewpoint, and that can be an advantage. But the issue is the longer term. If you sponsor some­one to do an MBA, will you get them back again?”

From The Independent