More M.B.A. Graduates Will Get Jobs in 2010
While it still isn't easy for M.B.A.'s to land a job, the hiring climate has improved from 2009.
Posted June 18, 2010
Before M.B.A. student Ryan Utsumi received his diploma from the University of California—San Diegothis month, he already had a job offer in hand. He was relaxed when he graduated, but the process of landing that job had tested his nerves. Utsumi spent the better part of 2010 searching for work at finance firms and startups. He had little luck, sending numerous applications and getting just a smattering of interviews. He'd heard the job search horror stories from 2009 M.B.A. graduates, Utsumi says, and, like many of his classmates, began to sweat when the calendar turned to March and he was still jobless.
Fortunately, Utsumi got a call from Charles Schwab—the firm he'd interned with during the previous summer and stayed in touch with intermittently through the academic year—and was offered a management position in the firm's strategy group. He starts at the end of the month, and he says that he's glad that, though they had to sweat, he and his classmates had better luck finding a job in the ravaged economy than their predecessors. "The job market is a little bit better [for me] than my classmates who graduated in 2009, but it still seemed to be very competitive and it was very difficult to get my foot in the door," he says. "Ideally, I would've had something wrapped up earlier on."
[Read about improvements in the job market for all college graduates.]
While Utsumi's job search was anything but brief, his reward was a full-time position. That, experts say, is something 2010 M.B.A. graduates should expect as they wade into the employment pool. While graduates may not find their ideal job or find a position as quickly as they'd hoped, there are more jobs to be had than in 2009, which was a dismal year for M.B.A. hiring. "This time last year, I had to check to see if my phone was still plugged into the wall," says Lynne Sarikas, director of the M.B.A. career