After years of law schools and medical schools directing their attention and resources to attracting women applicants, business schools are now seeing the reaped rewards from these same efforts of enticing more women into MBA programs. Historically, women enrollees have been considerably lower than their male counterparts. That’s changing, though. More business schools are bringing out the heavy artillery in their efforts, says A. Harrison Barnes, career coach and founder of EmploymentCrossing.com. Private parties, all expense paid trips and other incentives - such as cooking classes, of all things, are successfully wooing more women.
Some of the best business schools in the country are already reporting impressive growth from women applicants; sometimes up to 2 percent. This means more women are going to be entering their business careers higher up the corporate ladder than in previous years. The overall image is changing too, says the EmploymentCrossing.com founder. “Women aren’t as likely to be intimidated when faced with a tepid response in a classroom comprised of mostly men”.
A University of Michigan at Ann Arbor study revealed the main reasons the numbers have always been low have to do with a lack of female role models, a lack of encouragement by their employers and the belief business jobs would mean they would have to make more compromises in terms of marriage and family. Women have been becoming brilliant physicians and attorneys for decades, now the gap is closing in business, as well. A. Harrison Barnes says there’s one more reason women have sometimes steered clear of MBA programs that’s rather surprising: the quantitative capabilities are sometimes off-putting for women. Still, the report found that more than eighty percent of women business school grads agreed the MBA contributed significantly to their careers and that the challenges were well worth the anxiety and efforts.
One school, the University of Indiana’s Kelley School of Business, offered cooking classes as part of its enticement methods. Enrollment immediately increased by eight percentage points. This is indicative of women who want it all – and believe they can achieve it. From the results of this study, they’re right. From the boardroom to the kitchen to the school plays, today’s contemporary woman is realizing there’s a balance to be had – and they’re defining it to fit their needs.
Women have long since known they can incredible medical and legal careers and now, they know an MBA is within reach – and they don’t have to make the sacrifices those before them might have faced. The Stern School of Business, located in New York, has traditionally had the highest proportion of female students and it’s now reporting ratios of forty percent and growing. With more careers opening up, as evidenced by the trends on EmploymentCrossing.com, it’s clear there’s a new trend and for many, not a moment too soon.
Learn from the School of Hard Knocks to Gain Business Career Success
One of my college roommates had a brother who was a graduate business student and often visited our rooms. Since one of my possible career choices was to work in business, I asked this business student many questions about his studies and career choices. Everything he said expanded my knowledge and made me more interested in a business career.
This information meant a lot to me because I grew up in a small city where there were only two large employers, the Santa Fe Railway and the U.S. Air Force. Neither organization provided opportunities to learn about executive success in a large corporation.
When I began graduate business studies, I was pretty smug, thinking that I knew just what needed to be done: Get a prestigious degree and wait for highly attractive employers to bid for my services.
Talking with the other business students made me realize that I had a lot to learn about career success. I didn’t even understand what executives did in different industries.
My complacent eyes were opened wide one day when a management consultant from the famous McKinsey firm made a presentation. At the end of the discussion, I asked one of the other students who got to do what this presenter did for a living. My classmate quickly responded, “Strategy consultants.” I asked, “What’s a strategy consultant?” He responded that these were people who worked for McKinsey or The Boston Consulting Group. I remembered those answers and later applied to both firms, not quite knowing what to expect.
Even with all of this knowledge, I was totally unclear about how you went from being a management consultant to having a successful business career working for a large corporation. I guessed that someday a client might hire you. And that’s what did happen to me after I became a strategy consultant.
The key lesson from my experience is that you can have a wonderful education at a university and still lack important knowledge about the most fundamental elements of developing your business career.
Students typically prefer to get information about potential careers from fellow students and professors, but research shows that students and professors provide incomplete information. It’s better to also speak with people who have been developing a career for a decade or so to find out what lessons they learned in the school of hard knocks.
I was recently reminded of this source of information to make more effective business career plans when I corresponded with Dr. Robert Hartinger, a banking executive in Germany who is a Ph.D. graduate of Rushmore University. Dr. Hartinger kindly agreed to share his career experiences and lessons with me so that I could pass them along to you.
Dr. Hartinger started off presuming that the quality of your education was very important to career success. After graduating from his business program at a German university, he soon learned that you have few occasions to apply any of the theoretical knowledge that most schools provide. As a result, new graduates are stuffed full of knowledge and theory that has little relevance to what their employers need.
Instead, degrees qualify people to be considered for certain jobs. Many employers pride themselves on hiring from certain schools and restricting top jobs to those with the most advanced graduate degrees.
Traditional schooling provides few insights into what various industries and types of jobs are like. If students aren’t careful, they’ll seek a type of work that they won’t like. There are two alternatives available:
1. Examine industries and jobs carefully to set the right objectives.
2. Study at a school where you get practical experience in applying theoretical knowledge which gives you a sense of what a career doing that work might be like.
Dr. Hartinger doesn’t rule out the first alternative, but he’s confident that the second one is essential. If possible do both, but at least do the second. From what you learn, he also recommends that you focus on just a few opportunities. Otherwise, your attention and energies will be too widely scattered.
A lot of business success depends on your personality. That’s something that graduate schools often ignore. Outgoing people with pleasing, helpful personalities will do a lot better than grumpy, self-absorbed geniuses who rarely talk to anyone.
Many studies show that the ability to connect to other people in the organization greatly helps both job effectiveness and advancement. Why? It’s simple: You can’t know all of the answers, but with help from others you can do a great job.
But it’s not enough to simply be a connection point within the organization. You also need to add skills that improve your effectiveness.
Here’s where online learning can make a difference. People don’t care where you learn a skill; they are just pleased when you add one that’s relevant to your situation.
Today, many companies offer financial assistance for those who wish to learn new skills. When that assistance is provided over the Internet, costs are reduced and you can take more courses than those who enroll in classroom-based courses. In addition, learning while you work allows you the chance to apply what you are learning. In that way, you can sift through lots of theoretical knowledge to get just what you need. Dr. Hartinger also notes that if an online school offers flexibility in designing courses, your skill improvement can be even greater.
Questions To Ask When Buying a Business – Job Satisfaction & Lifestyle
Ice cream was invented in 2k BC. Yet it was 3,900 years on before somebody worked out the ice cream cone. Beef was on the planet before humans. Bread was baked in 2600 BC. Nevertheless, it took another 4,300 years for someone to put them together and create the sandwich. And the modern flush toilet was invented in 1775, but it wasn t until 1857 that someone thought up toilet paper.
Once these clear connections have been made, they appear so obvious. We are able to t believe we didn t see them sooner. A never ending number of these unmade connections exist to this day, particularly in the business world. You are encircled by easy, plain solutions that can dramatically boost your income, power, influence and success. The problem is, you simply don t see them.
Before Henry Ford would hire anybody for a crucial position, he’d have lunch with them. If the potential worker would salt the food before tasting it, Mr. Ford would not hire the person. The reason? Salting the food before tasting it indicated the person would implement a plan before testing it – ergo, no job. Was Henry Ford too intense with his hiring policy based on salting food before testing? Maybe. But, then again, Henry Ford was America s first billionaire.
One company that seemingly didn t test enough is the maker of Excedrin. Many years back they ran a multi-million dollar, national advertising campaign showing different, better than average headaches and assigning them numbers, like Excedrin headache #9, Excedrin headache twenty-three, etc, where Excedrin relieved the agony. The campaign made great name recognition and was seemingly very successful. But, in fact, sales went down. The company later learned that people were aware of the campaign and said that Excedrin was a superb, stronger-than-average discomfort reliever. And if they’d a serious headache they had a severe headache they’d definitely take Excedrin. But if they headache, an average headache, Excedrin was a more robust medicine than they needed, so they would take a gentler discomfort reliever like aspirin. The company could have saved millions of bucks and not lost market had they done one simple thing. TEST.
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