IESEseeks to have a fundamental impact on the way our participants do business, be they students of our MBA or one of our other programs, so naturally the MBA has a very high personal development aspect. The two-year duration of the program is an essential part of this transformational experience, allowing students a host of opportunities to reflect upon what they hope to get out of the MBA and their future as business leaders.
Alejandro Herrera, Director of IESE Career Services.
One of the few, two-year MBAs available in Europe, IESE’s program gives students the chance to undertake summer internships and take part in international exchanges, at the same time as working on essential business skills over a longer period of time, and truly taking advantage of experiencing European culture. The overall experience helps to enrich the future managers with a global outlook and furnish them with the skills to face the most complex business situations. This, in turn, secures bright futures for our graduates, over 90% of whom had accepted job offers, only three months after graduation, last year.
Throughout the course, we challenge students to really think about what career path is right for them. A high percentage of students come to us unsure of where they want to be when they leave and 55% of them actually change careers after the MBA. In a one-year program, you really can’t afford to do this, time constraints often shift the focus towards fast-tracking students’ careers rather than considering if this is the way forward in the long term. Of course, that is not to say that our students don’t boost their careers, in fact, for the past six, years IESE has consistently come top in the percentage of salary increase in MBA rankings.
Our careers services team works hard to ensure that students are in close contact with recruiters, and, as part of this, runs a comprehensive corporate internship scheme between the first and second years. We work with a wide variety of organisations (both corporations and NGOs) year after year to help students transition into a new professional field, improve their professional profiles, network and, possibly, be considered for an early job offer. In fact, many of graduates go on to work for the company they did their internship with and all of them rate it as invaluable in considering their next steps.
While the internships are not compulsory, they are very much encouraged and over 90% of our students take on one of these three-month projects all over the world to further broaden their perspectives. Far from a break from the program, the projects carried out by our students are focused on solving specific business problems or performing studies using the knowledge acquired on the MBA program. These range from implementation of new systems, to the assessment of organizational problems such as restructuring and function definition, to assisting management in new areas for business and many other interesting aspects. It’s really a win-win situation: the companies get the assistance of our top MBA students and the students get a chance to both test the water of a new industry and apply some of what they have learned on the MBA. Some like their roles on the internship, some are less enthusiastic, but the two-year duration of the MBA gives them this great chance to have a try at a new career path before committing themselves.
At the end of the day, we realise that doing an MBA is as much about ensuring a high return on investment as it is about teaching business excellence. Our two-year MBA really encourages students to think about what their long term professional future is, ensuring that whatever they choose to go on to do, it is sustainable for them from a personal and professional perspective. The high percentage of students who change careers upon graduation reflects this transformational effect, which in most cases translates to a higher percentage salary increase and thus a greater return on investment.
Source: QS topMBA Career Guide