Full-time MBA programs offer a wide range of specializations. Depending on school’s policies, you may choose to specialize in either one or two or even none at all. Choosing a specialization should be based on your education and career goals.
Below is a list of most popular specializations.
Marketing
Finance
Operations Management
Strategy
Entrepreneurship
Information and Technology Management
Human Resource Management
A brief description of each specialization:
MarketingMarketing specialization provides you with a knowledge and decision tools to address the marketing challenges faced by firms. The specialization helps you to design and implement the best combination of marketing actions to carry out a firm’s strategy in its target market.
With marketing specialization, you can address issues such as: How do consumers process and evaluate prices, how should a firm set price for new and existing products, how should a firm adapt prices for varying market circumstances, and what is the role of competitors’ prices, etc.
You also get a good understanding of branding: what a brand is, what functions brands serve, and when a branding strategy is relevant for consumers and the firm?
Most the MBA School’s marketing curriculum prepare you for the executive marketing positions – despite the fact that your first job after graduating from the school will be either sales role or a lowly brand assistant at an FMCG company.
Although you can learn a lot in marketing class, no amount of schooling can teach you the experience, the instinct and the creativity of a really skilled marketing professional. That is one of the reasons why a large number of marketing professionals are so highly paid.
FinanceLearning finance enables you to put every intuitive business idea to the acid test: Does the idea (eventually) make money?
For any business, having knowledge of finance is critical. Whether it is a question of how to create value or how to understand various drivers of value, you need to have knowledge of finance. It enables you to address issues such as how to finance assets in a business or how to manage risks in a business.
Even for any important ideas such as start-ups or large corporates undertaking organic growth, M&A or international expansion, you need to have a good understanding of finance.
The goal of the finance specialization is to equip you with tools and coherent analytic framework to make financial decisions that create value for shareholders.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, finance was the most sought after career for MBA graduates. Most MBA graduates dreamed of a career on Wall Street. Unfortunately, with the 2008 financial crisis, MBAs are now less likely to choose a career in banking than they were before.
Even though the popularity of finance career has fallen, MBAs are still doing quite well in finance. MBAs from the top business schools still prefer jobs in investment banking and are paid significantly more than their non-MBA peers.
[Click here to read about rest of the specializations]