Is an Executive MBA Worth It? Part I
Spoiler Alert: It Depends
The worth/worthlessness of an MBA is a topic that never seems to get old. Google “Is an MBA worth it 2023” and it returns 1.26 billion results in 0.40 seconds. Clearly, there is a lot to be said about the subject, or probably more accurately, it’s a topic about which many have an opinion.
Google the question “Is an Executive MBA worth it 2023?” and you get 334 million results in 0.50 seconds. So even though the question is a bit less popular when “MBA” is replaced by “Executive MBA,” people still have plenty to say about it, and there is obviously enough interest in the question to merit that much volume on Google.
For comparison, google “Do these pants make me look fat" and you get only ~ 7.5 million results.
Of course, the answer is always “It depends” (for the degree, not the pants) but that would shorten this blog post to two unhelpful paragraphs.
The answer is “yes, it’s worth it” if one of your longest-held goals has been to earn an advanced degree. The answer is “yes, it’s worth it” if you are a life-long learner and one of your goals is to continually broaden your base of knowledge and challenge yourself intellectually. The answer is “yes, it’s worth it” if it’s a requirement for your employment.
IS AN MBA REALLY REQUIRED FOR THE TYPE OF WORK YOU DO?
That last one—requirement for your employment—is a little tricky. Here’s the thing: I’ve never heard of a commerce/business-related job that could not be completed without the benefit of an MBA (or an EMBA, which is a species of MBA). But even if there were such a job, I’m betting you could find the MBA stuff you needed to know online. For example, MIT offers a 12-week Mathematical Methods for Quantitative Finance course FREE through their Open Learning platform. Last I checked, FREE was less than $197,000 which is the tuition for MIT’s (excellent) Executive MBA program (at the time of publishing).
There are employers, and indeed industries, where it goes without saying that you’ll need an MBA to get hired (see: McKinsey) but that’s not the same as absolutely needing the knowledge you would gain in an MBA course (like strategy, for example) to be a good consultant. Instead, there is an unspoken expectation that you WILL have an MBA if you want a future in a prestigious consulting firm. But don’t forget: expectations and requirements are two different things.
The reality is that most of what you do in business (and life) can be learned without the benefit of an advanced degree, or a degree at all, for that matter. Take Richard Branson, for example: the guy dropped out of high school and look where he is now. Euclid never even went to high school and he has an entire field of study—Euclidean Geometry—named after him.
THAT DARN JOB MARKET
But there’s another reality out there and it’s called the job market. Nowadays, regardless of employer, if a hiring manager prefers that applicants have an advanced degree for whatever reason, it’s communicated loud and clear in the job description as “MBA preferred.” What this really means is that if you don’t have one, you’ll be screened out before you even get to a phone interview. Yes, I know people without advanced degrees get phone interviews with employers that “prefer” an MBA. It’s just that 99.999% don’t.
The bottom line is if you want an “MBA preferred” job, the answer to the question of whether an MBA/EMBA is worth it is “yes, it’s worth it” and here’s why:
Returning once again to the font of all knowledge, Google, a search on “how to get past the “MBA preferred” keywords in a job description" returns about 22+ million results. And there might well be 22 million ways to try to get around that “preference” but quite honestly, your chances of getting past “MBA preferred” in an AI-powered ATS (Applicant Tracking System) without the degree are about as good as your chances of winning Powerball: entirely possible and (very) unlikely.
YOU SAY TOMATO…
Recruiters like to say that ATSs “screen people in” but that’s just cheerful semantics at work. The whole purpose of an ATS is to give recruiters an easier way to plow through the enormous volume of resumes they receive—in other words, to screen people out. An ATS will ignore resumes that don’t include those pesky keywords found in a job description. You can argue with a thesaurus all you want but “ignore” and screen out” are pretty close to the same thing, at least in this context.
Research conducted by Harvard Business School (updated in October 2021) found that 88% of recruiters surveyed knew they (and by extension, their ATS systems) were overlooking qualified candidates because resumes didn’t include words that exactly matched those in job descriptions, but there was no follow up to find out how many of those recruiters ditched their screening system because of this glaring flaw. My guess? Exactly zero.
So again, you might be a great fit for a job but there’s a good chance you’ll be overlooked if you don’t have the degree an employer “prefers” on your resume.
PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD
To summarize, if you’re job hunting and you want an “MBA preferred” job, you can significantly increase your chances of getting that “MBA preferred” job by getting an MBA. It just depends on how badly you want the job. Maybe a lotto ticket would be a better idea. Just sayin’.
OK, you say, but what about me, the life-long learner or the currently/happily employed employee? How do I assess the degree’s value for myself? There are a couple other ways of thinking about it and the next post, “Is an EMBA Worth It Part II,” introduces one of them.