Maintenance background at Oil PSU to executive MBA

Hello arnab734 hope you are doing well

1. Yes of course, your experience would be highly valued at companies post MBA as long as you are setting goals (or targeting roles) that align well with your career trajectory so far. Similar to how at each job one needs to focus on the transferable skills from the prior job experiences, you would also have to convince the admissions committee (and later the companies) that you have a solid basis for choosing an industry or role for your post PGP career.

2. I believe that your choice of general management roles or operations mgt is very much in line with your prior experience. Alternatively, your goals could be ambitious too, therefore there is nothing wrong with aiming for Management Consulting either as consulting companies are always looking for candidates with strong industry experience. It would be best to deliberate on what would you like to do in the long term and break down the trajectory into possible career paths with a plan A and plan B so as to give yourself some flexibility (also to the Business schools).

3. There is no direct answer to this question. My suggestion would be to talk to as many alumni as you can from your target schools, especially those who have also worked in PSUs previously to understand how did they go about planning the transition from a PSU to the B School to the private sector. An exceptional applicant would draw insights from these interactions and use the takeaways in his SOPs and interviews to his advantage demonstrating a conscientious strategy for his own transition. However, from my own experience, some of the roles you could consider exploring because of your background are Supply chain/operations design, supply chain product (design or operations), Analytics and Business Finance (especially at start ups if finance interests you but you have no prior experience in finance), and consulting or corporate strategy for startups or corporates in energy domain.

Feel free to reach out in case you wish to seek professional guidance on your applications.

Best wishes