Ivey MBA Career quest, going in “deep and wide”

Let’s make this a part 2 of the George’s MBA career search series. A quick recap of where we left it off last time:

1. Came into the MBA program over ambitious
2. Thought a top tier consulting job was the “it” job
3. Started wondering if consulting was really “it”
4. Didn’t get second round consulting interviews
5. Thought I was a failure
6. Took another look at non-Investment Banking and non-consulting jobs to realize that despite the lack of glamour they are jobs out there that might be just as good if not better that those “it” jobs

Alright so here you might start to get a sense of what the MBA career search really feels like. The analogy that comes to mind is the one of a roller coaster. If you have ever been on one of those crazy high roller coasters, you know the feeling where you rise up up and up, and it seems like you are on top of the world just to be screaming and going doooooown the next moment. Similarly, MBA career search too has a lot of ups and downs. And the first time you go through one of these downs, your get a shrinking feeling in your stomach. You think to yourself: Was it the right decision to spend $100 grand on the MBA, or maybe I should have listened to my family!

So here I was at the end of September, I found myself with no job and at a bit of dead end in my initial industry of choice (consulting). I was at a crossroads; I could continue my career search in consulting, targeting more boutique firms and ultimately lowering my career expectations. Other option would be to decide that despite my initial decision consulting wasn’t the right “fit” for me and move on in my career search. As a bit of side note, I believe human beings are naturally prewired for continuity, from the infancy majority of us seek comfort in routines and familiar environments that we are accustomed to. That in turn makes life predictable and comfortable. Moreover, to make life even easier we create a mental picture of our environment, a map of sorts to help simplify the everyday life. One of the hardest realizations at least for me has been to admit to yourself that your map is wrong and needs fixing. For an instance you realize that you are in conflict with yourself, and you have to tell your old self that she was wrong and that hurts. It does sting your pride but none the less you have to take the “plunge” and just move on.

And plunge I did take…

First of all I decided not to be closed minded to any job posting that comes up on school’s internal job posting website. While trying to look at those posting as objective as I could. That was the wide part of the “deep and wide” strategy. As the result I ended up interviewing for Product Management at Google, Project Executive at IBM, Leadership Development program at Eli Lilly and Company (Pharmaceutical) and a couple of other ones that I would have never considered just few short months before. The only promise that I made to myself was to be honest with interviewers about both myself and what I was looking to get out of the next job. That way I was hoping to make the job search process more collaborative, enlisting employers to help me land an ideal job. I took the principles that at least in theory should make you a more successful entrepreneur and applied them to my job search. Those were an almost unlimited faith in success and the willingness to push yourself forward towards your goals despite people around you telling you it won’t work.

The months of October through February I was going wide, doing as much research on my own as learning in action through interviews. I kept actively reaching out to alumni to meet with them and to understand new industry niches that appeared as a good “fit” for my skills and future career aspirations. At the same time I started to better understand the rules of the game: understand your strengths, realize your weaknesses and look for jobs where there are jobs. Let me elaborate: Strengths and weaknesses help you realize some of the constraints that you are going to be operating under in your job search. And looking for the jobs where there are jobs is a “no-brainer”!

I took a clean piece of paper, and I wrote my direct work experience, so out came the experience with Wealth Management industry, Product Management experience with Technology and finally some Sales experience. Then I started thinking about my other interests, such as Project Management, Leadership and Finance. Then I wrote down my weaknesses, but I’m not going to tell you those ;)

And finally after months of searching, BINGO!! One of the things that I accidentally got involved in at school was a helping to put together a transportation conference. The purpose of the conference was to bring together majority of stakeholders for the upcoming Québec – Ontario transportation corridor and to get process moving on public policy framework for this project. One piece of the project that I found of great interest was the use of public private partnerships (P3s) to help finance and build the infrastructure. On top of it, the more I researched it the more I was getting convinced that this is the perfect thing for me. I thought that this industry will not only let me leverage my experience with Public policy and project management but also be a perfect fit with my interest in Finance. Lastly, talking to alumni and doing research made it sound as if there’s a lot of potential for growth in this industry thus creating a lot of potential opportunities.

Now it was time to go deep…

I spend the next three months doing exactly as planned: strategically trying to hammer at the P3 market here in Canada. I reached out to major organizations such as Infrastructure Ontario, Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (now Metrolinx), banks, and contractors, basically you name it. And things were going great. I’ve applied to a job at a major player in the Ontario P3 market. I spoke to their CEO, HR and couple other people. I felt that the prospects of me getting the job were good. I even had people trying to help speed things up internally. Now let me bring you back to my roller coaster analogy at the beginning of this post. It felt as if I was on top of the world and could smell and touch that P3 Job. But fortunately for me I would get a chance to experience that again couple of times during the summer. Did I mention that I love roller coasters? So needless to say the P3 job never happened for me.

Next on the list was an international career. I spend significant part of my life in Moscow Russia and speak the language fluently, so I thought why not look for a job there. Furthermore, the job situation in Canada and North America has been deteriorating significantly throughout the year leading to a recruitment freeze on both Bay and Wall Streets. Again working my contacts and alumni I was actually able to come quite close to getting an internship in Moscow Russia with European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). And again up I went on that roller coaster getting all excited at the prospects of joining EBRD and helping them put together a policy framework for micro financing in Russia with potential for a permanent job after the 6 month internship. But you guessed it, at the last minute EBRD cancelled the position as they didn’t get enough applicants. All I could do at that point was to smile and think that this all felt too much like a déjà vu over and over again. How can one operate if even such a basic thing as the lucky three rule has failed you ahaaahah (consulting, P3, and now EBRD)? I knew though that instead of putting my hands down now was the time to push it even harder.

But what I didn’t know if that my luck was about to finally take a turn for better.

The art of luck and the science of success when it comes to an MBA job search.

First of all I want to Thank all of you who directly or indirectly asked me about my MBA job search and wished me luck. It’s been quite an involved process and I’m glad to report to you that I have landed my dream job. Sorry to keep you in suspense, now I can finally write to you about the MBA career management and job search at Ivey. I’m planning to do it over a couple of separate posts so stay tuned.

Let me start off by making sure that we are all on the same page, I write this post with an underlying assumption that the objective of the majority of people pursuing an MBA is to get a better job, myself included. It typically happens either through landing a position of increased responsibility in their existing firm/career path or through switching into a totally new industry upon graduation. I say majority as there are always exceptions to a rule, and there might be people who are either looking to start new businesses, are working in a family business setting, or just decided to do it for fun (don’t laugh I met people who have done just that).

MBA is no doubt a hyped-up degree, at least at this point. And with it comes a warning: use with caution as a targeted career advancement tool. Just like a surgical scalpel it’s not a universal tool and is only as good as the hand guiding it, you being the hand in this particular analogy. So one has to not only have a good idea of what you want to get out of the MBA but also be realistic about one’s own skills going into the MBA. On the flip side it’s also seemingly hard to believe whether there’s actually any real content behind all that hype, and if it is worth investing perfectly good $100,000+ into the MBA when Porsche Cayman might seem like a pretty good investment at least in terms of a subsequent gain in popularity.

Consider the following though, I did a rough first year Return on Investment (ROI) calculation couple of days ago, using the numbers from my new job. I also compared that to the ROI from my undergraduate computer engineering degree. Turns out that the undergraduate first year ROI for me worked out to be in the order of 10-12% while ROI for the MBA is at least four times as much. Not bad… Having said that, there are number of conditions that might affect your MBA ROI, for example you being in right place at the right time; level of salary going in and the condition of a general economy upon the graduation.

Let me now rewind the clock a year and a half back and take another look at my expectations going into the MBA (and whether they were entirely realistic)

At the time, my view of the MBA world was shaped by the information I gathered from MBA portals on Business Week and Financial Times websites, student blogs and school placement statistics. Moreover, in the beginning the recipe seemed unbelievably easy: add three magical letters (M, B and A) behind your name and your salary doubles or even triples, what can be easier, right? Then came the question of why does it cost $10,000 to get an MBA at some schools while at others it’s a cool $100,000+ for the same three letters. Maybe you get those letters in “gold”, joked I with my friends back then. The answer is of course as with any other product the final price is a combination of variety of factors. Brand premium is certainly there for a top tier schools as you are paying for prestige of attending a school that has distinguished history. There are a lot of tangible things though that you get at a top tier MBA School, such as:

• ability to forge strong connections to your classmates who are bound to have a future multimillionaire or two amongst them


• access to the responsive alumni network that has a lot of senior decision makers amongst it’s ranks (read people who can hire you or back your next business venture)


• there’s also the quality of recruiters that the university is able to attract


• and finally, the higher quality of education (although it’s becoming more of a plain vanilla component with a lot of lower tier schools able to provide at least as good of education)

With the top tier MBA program you get all the high quality ingredients, while with the third tier program you might get a great education but that alone might not be able to propel you forward in your career by as much.

So to come back to my initial expectations, I though getting into one of Canada’s top business schools pretty much guaranteed that are you will become rich by the age of 30 i.e. get a great Consulting or an IBanking (CIB) job with a top tier firm (plus the associated competitive compensation package). In retrospective, that was obviously a bit of an overestimation on my part. Allow me to elaborate: on the first day of classes I realized that I wasn’t so special in my preference for the post MBA career, meaning that pretty much all of my classmates wanted to also get some flavor of a CIB job. That presented me with a bit of a pickle as there was only a limited number of spots available at the top consulting firms, in past years top tier consulting firms combined took five – six people from of each MBA class. So having 40 people compete for those 5 available spots did start to sound like a bit of competition. None the less I was quite confident in my abilities to prove to a top tier consulting firm that I was the right guy for them.

To be honest, at the time I was completely blinded by those highly desirable CIB jobs, and simple logic worked wonders: if everybody else wants it means those CIB jobs are great. It was clearly the case of “group think” where we all wanted those top tier jobs and thus it made it so much more desirable to get them. For me it translated into good three months of research as well as endless hours of interview practice getting ready for those tough consulting interviews.

As far as the school initiated career activities go, less than a month into the program we started getting a constant stream of visitors from consulting, finance and industry. Each trying to shed a bit of light on exactly what they did in their day to day jobs. Furthermore, two months into the program we had a career week in Toronto, where there was a selection of top firms lined up for us to meet. Full days of various industry information sessions, company hosted info and mingling sessions, mock interviews, and one-on-one meetings. It was then when we first started to get a real sense of what different industry jobs are all about, and how they stack against the CIB jobs.

And then came September, the month that majority of top tier CIB firms do their hiring (a year in advance). I had a couple of first round interviews and that’s as far as it went for me in consulting. Ouch… I being rejected?! Of course I was initially somewhat disillusioned and disappointed, although the more I thought about it the more I realized I was relieved deep down, as right around then I was starting to doubt that consulting was really the place for me at this point in my career. I figured, on the bright side those consulting interviews are really rigorous at testing whether you are going to be a good “fit” with the firm’s culture. Based on their extensive experience firms have a pretty good idea if you’d do well in their consulting environment. That in turn saves everybody unnecessary pain and suffering of discovering two months down the road that you hate your new job and want to quit.

If you are considering Consulting you have to really ask yourself if you are ready to work 70-80 hours a week, IBanking is more along the lines of 100 hours. Granted the pay for either stream is quite competitive at mid $100s for the first year, including year end bonus. Furthermore, IBanking is used to be a steeper climb after the first year vs. Consulting. The Subprime meltdown in 2007 in US might change that.

One of the most common MBA student traps is that students typically equate those top tier CIB jobs with all the future glamour. Seeing their peers get those sexy six figure jobs early on makes people naturally think they missed out on a one in a lifetime opportunity and now it’s much less likely that they will land any kind of a decent job. And taking a look around I saw that my situation wasn’t all that unique and there was a large number of my classmates that didn’t get those dream (or so I thought at that time) jobs.

October was a month when one could sense some tension in the air at school... The question of the month in October was whether MBA was the right decision for me. I mean here you are having invested big chuck of your net worth into your MBA education, going knee deep in debt and it turns out you can’t get the job that you wanted so much, it sucks! to say the least. Furthermore, the question that lingers on your mind at that point is: So what’s next?

From the information sessions earlier in the year we saw that Industry and Corporate Finance (ICF) jobs have their own very tangible set of benefits. You not only get the hands-on experience of seeing your ideas through but you also maintain your quality of life (relatively of course). Despite the initial impression the compensation is actually also competitive, especially if you consider it on a $ per hour basis. Furthermore, those ICF jobs are not as volatile as the CIB jobs, which are highly related to how well economy is doing at the given moment.

More about my job search in the next post…
George