Question

When thinking about earning an MBA, what are three pieces of advice you would give to a new MBA student based on what you have learned along the way; also, what should be their next steps as they consider their leadership best practices?

Answer 1

Earning an MBA (Master of business administration) from any reputed university in the world qualifies any student to earn a six-figure salary and an opportunity to climb corporate hierarchy faster than other graduates. It also helps the student to become a future entrepreneur by making him or her develop skills related to marketing, human resources, finance, logistics and customer retention. But, still, not all MBAs can become successful in their entrepreneur journey if they haven't inherited being creative and initiates efforts to be one step ahead of others in this competitive world. The following three pieces of advice can be given to the young aspirants, who have the enthusiasm to earn this academic degree:

1st Advise: Do M.B.A from quality business schools who have an opportunity to place you in highly competitive industry sectors like McKinsey, Google, Facebook and other fortunes 500 tech firms. By doing so, you can kick start your career soon and can easily climb corporate hierarchy by gaining experience and acquiring suitable skills.

2nd Advise: Job aspirants should take specializations in Marketing, Finance, Human resources, Information technology, supply chain and logistics to increase their chances of hiring and pay rate in multinational firms, rather than doing general M.B.A, while entrepreneurs have to take multiple specializations to make their business successful. This is because an entrepreneur can run his or her business successfully if they have complete knowledge about all these aspects of the business.

3rd Advise: Take live project work in any existing company or short term internships, to get hired as early as possible by the multinational firms. Doing project work in a company will always help the student to understand concepts of business in a real-life situation, acquire skills and adds to the experience.

Leadership best practices: After earning an M.B.A degree, it is necessary for the students to develop leadership skills to become successful. Leadership skills will enable any person to run a successful organization. An organisation with best leaders will have a strong customer base, high employee morale, financial gains, product quality and high organization productivity. The important practices to develop leadership skills are as follows:

1. Self-development: Business leaders always have to take time at least in a week or bi-weekly to update their knowledge in their relevant field. This can be done using short online videos or attending a short online course. The ability to learn continuously can increase the leader's self-development, which is essential to establish a strong independent organization.

2. Innovation: Change is essential for any business to stay strong in the rat race competition. For this business has to evolve creatively. So, leaders have to try always something new every time. This can be done by trying to do routine work differently or by thinking differently about a process.

3. Team development: Leaders have to establish strong teams to become successful in a complex competitive market environment of business. Leaders have to encourage the team to work independently and also coherently to achieve team goals and thus the organization goals. This can be done by communication with them effectively through formal or informal meetings once a week. These meetings can help to get to know about employees preferences and choices, which will indeed help to retain employees by avoiding job hoppings in the organization