The Most In-Demand Skills Among MBA Graduates
By Kieran Dahl
When Greg Sylvester became a hiring manager at eBay in 2009, a candidate’s application mattered less than who they knew at the company. Interviews were informal and ad hoc — Sylvester would just look at a candidate’s resumé and talk with them about their background.
“There was no data or AI involved,” says Sylvester, now a vice president of product management at American Express and a member of the University of Phoenix College of Business and Information Technology Advisory Council. “Today, there are a lot of tools and strategies that have enabled us to be more effective at targeting and hiring.”
For both job candidates and hiring managers like Sylvester, recruiting isn’t what it used to be. This is largely thanks to advancements in technology and workplace strategy. AI-powered recruiting tools, for instance, foster diversity and inclusion in the hiring process. This agile methodology, adopted by over 70% of companies globally, accelerates the hiring process by promoting collaboration and constant iteration.
Skill mapping, also known as competency mapping, is a paradigm of the trend toward efficient, meritocratic recruiting. For an employer, skill mapping means creating a detailed overview of the skills needed to succeed in a given job or to complete a particular project, then taking an inventory of a team’s skills by diagramming each employee’s strengths and weaknesses. With a skill map, a hiring manager can clearly see a team’s available skills, required skills and missing skills — and then hire candidates who specifically fill the existing skill gaps.
In the MBA program at University of Phoenix, the skills mapped are communication, leadership, operations, management and decision-making. At American Express, Sylvester looks for a few basic skill sets when hiring strategy, technical, analytical and leadership and management (if the role involves managing people). The overlap in these skills is not a coincidence. University of Phoenix increasingly aligns its curriculum to meet the needs of the workforce.
For MBA graduates, knowing the specific skills mapped by employers (and knowing how skill mapping works) is second only to the development of those skills.
Robert Thompson is a vice president of technology and an engineering manager at a fortune 50 bank, where he’s worked for nearly 25 years. He is also a member of the Advisory Council and says that what he most values in MBA graduates are big-picture problem-solving skills.
“Graduates are often ready for heads-down problem-solving, but they don’t necessarily take the time to assess a strategy and options,” he says. “They’ll put little thought into cross-team or cross-enterprise impact or alignment, or into the integration needs of a solution and how it might affect future challenges.”
But, Thompson says, MBA graduates also need to have a strong background in technology.
“As technology advances, the need for skill mapping becomes more important,” he says. “The skill sets sought by employers are much more specialized than when I last interviewed.”
That means, for example, software developers have to be experienced in secure coding practices and ADA website accessibility standards. It also means MBA graduates have to be experienced in the fast-evolving fields of data science and risk management — because a “deeper understanding” of APIs, cloud architecture and big-data integrations, Thompson says, is how they’ll be able to make their companies more “resilient to the passing of time.”
Thompson has different ways of assessing in candidates the skills mapped by University of Phoenix’s MBA program. For decision-making skills, he’ll ask them to talk about a project or task they were responsible for, then to define and rationalize important decisions made during its lifecycle.
For communication skills, he says, “I engage the applicant on a topic that they’re going to have to spend some time explaining,” like an accomplishment listed on their resumé.
For operations skills, he looks for candidates to discuss a product through the lens of customer service, capabilities to alert and alarm and problem-ticket management.
“Most [recent graduates I’ve interviewed] lack an understanding of risk management and governance,” he says. “That’s an important skill, and one that I would associate with a potential leader.”
But how can someone demonstrate leadership skills when they’ve never led a team? How can a newly minted MBA graduate show their management skills beyond just pointing to the classes on their transcript?
According to both Thompson and Sylvester, interviewing is the most important part of the hiring process — because it’s in interviews that they can really assess whether a candidate has the skills they’ve already mapped. Interviews, Sylvester says, are how he determines whether a candidate can apply the skills listed on their résumé to real-world problems. “It’s scenarios,” he says. “It’s inductive and deductive reasoning.”
Sylvester might ask an engineering candidate a question as broad and open-ended as “How would you develop a drone-based delivery service?” Of course, a candidate’s response could go in a thousand different directions. “There’s no right or wrong answer,” Sylvester says, “but I look for cues: Can this skill be developed? Can those aspects be learned?”
Maybe they’d focus on the drone itself: Is it fast and strong enough to ship objects of a certain size? Is there an airport or warehouse nearby? Maybe they’d think more about getting the service to market: Who are the potential customers? What about starting a partnership with FedEx? Maybe they’d first calculate roughly how many drones would be needed to service a specific city.
“From that question alone,” Sylvester continues, “I can pick up on a candidate’s skills in strategy, in product management, in the technical. Where they go deeper is really where they’re comfortable.” Their skills are revealed more by the way they answer the question than by the content of the answer itself.
“We’re not asking questions about their resumé anymore,” Sylvester reiterates. “We’re asking questions to see how they can think creatively.” For some, that might be “a little bit out of bounds,” but the MBA graduates familiar with skill mapping and other progressive hiring practices should feel right at home.
The skills you learn should align with what you need to succeed. Discover how University of Phoenix Interested in getting your MBA? Learn more about the MBA program at University of Phoenix creates curriculum around the knowledge today’s employers want.
Originally published at https://www.phoenix.edu on August 20, 2021.
