A Wall Street Journal article, "State of the Job Market for M.B.A.s," explores the ups and downs of the post-recession job search and how recent MBA grads are coping.
While graduates from top business schools like Wharton or Northwestern Kellogg are seeing a positive pick up in the job market, other graduates, like those from NYU Stern and University of Texas-Austin's McCombs School of Business, are faced with a job market that has not yet recovered from the 2009 recession.
At NYU, only 76% of students had a job offer by graduation in 2009; at McCombs, only a lucky 70% had that privilege. In normal, pre-recession years, more than 90% of students receive job offers by graduation.
Abby Scott, executive director of MBA career services at UC Berkeley Haas has dubbed this post-recession era as "the year of the networked job search." Haas students explain that they can't rely as much on "robust school-led recruiting effort[s]" as they can on individual efforts.
In terms of the sorts of jobs that are available, there are certain sectors that are seeing a rise in MBA hiring and some that are not. For example, jobs in retail or at luxury firms are few and far between, while jobs in consulting and financial services are on the hiring rebound, relates the WSJ article.
Rotational programs are also on the rise, receiving a 36% increase in hiring this year. Students are also opting to head abroad and search for jobs in other markets. Blair Sheppard, Duke Fuqua dean, explains that MBA grads used to rarely consider going overseas—salaries weren't high enough to entice a loan-heavy graduate—but now, overseas salaries have increased, offering grads a wider, global job search.
The article continues to state that there's hope for next year's grads as evidenced by the increase in internships this past year. At Wharton, for example, on-campus summer internships increased 30%, a number close to pre-recession rates.
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