If you ask where MBAs are hired, the first thoughts that come to mind tend to be banks, investment firms and other financial institutions, and in some cases, you might hear about marketing and logistics firms hiring them. However, tech companies now make the list of hot job opportunities for MBAs and tech companies are employing MBAs now more than ever. Let’s look at the data and the trends behind it.
Where Graduates are Applying
Technology in all its forms is pervasive, and technology companies have become household names. This is part of the reason why three out of the five most desired employers by business students were Google, Apple and Amazon. The fact that tech tends to pay quite well certainly leads to many MBAs trying to work there. The median base salary in tech for MBA graduates from sought after schools can hit $125,000.
Who’s Hiring MBA Graduates?
According to a report by Poets and Quants, Amazon alone hired over 400 MBAs over the past 5 years and Google and Microsoft both hired about 200 graduates during the same period. LinkedIn, Dell, Intuit and Facebook are also at the top of the list for tech companies hiring MBAs. Actually, the Haas School of Business at Berkley and Foster School of Business at the University of Washington have sent more graduates into tech than finance.
According to the same study, this seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. For Spain’s IE Business School which forms a large portion of the country’s MBAs, the tech industry recently surpassed finance as the biggest employer for graduates.
MBA graduates are seeking to fill any role at tech companies simply because they are hiring. In fact, the demand for MBAs in the technology industry was up almost 5% last year.
The Retooling of the MBA Program to Serve Tech Companies
While tech companies are increasingly hiring MBAs to fill HR and finance roles, market new products and bring financial discipline to startups, another factor driving this trend is the shift in many MBA programs to prepare graduates to work with technology and work in the tech sector. For example, some MBA programs added content tech companies value such as data analytics.
Marketing classes include social media marketing along with traditional forms of marketing. In many other programs, students learn how to use business IT applications as one of their core classes and far more business schools are including case studies from the technology sector.
For example, they’re teaching students how to combine brick and mortar retail sales with online sales and how to use brick and mortar stores as online fulfilment centers, processing orders from a website. Skills like this make MBAs more valuable to any technology company as well as traditional businesses trying to improve online sales.
Technology isn’t eliminating the need for the MBA degree. In fact, it is creating new opportunities for MBAs, and the technology sector is hiring MBAs in droves because of the value they provide.
