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APRIL 28, 2003 B-SCHOOL Q&A: PLACEMENT From Carnegie Mellon to a Career Ken Keeley of CMU's Graduate School of Industrial Administration says it's a tough market but students are still getting placed
Before arriving at Carnegie Mellon, Keeley directed the MBA program at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. On Apr. 10, he spoke with BusinessWeek Online management education reporter Brian Hindo about the MBA job market. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow: Q: How does this corporate-recruiting cycle compare with last year? A: This is a quantitatively oriented place, so we look at metrics every week. My best guess, if I were trying to do a summary, is most of the [job-placement] metrics are running about 10% to 15% below last year. And last year I thought was not very good. Q: Can you describe some of the metrics you use? A: Yes. All schools try to track what's happening to their graduates. One of the vehicles we have is a Web-based system that enables students to enter their own offers. They can go back and edit them, see them, etc. That's how we get a lot of information. We also get some information directly from companies or when students stop in to visit us. We try to monitor things like what percentage of students have offers at different times and how many companies are making offers. We're not just doing it for our full-time MBAs, but also for our part-time MBAs, for two specialized programs, and for our summer-intern candidates. We do a comparison every Friday -- this is where we are today, and this is where we were one year ago. Q: How does this MBA job market compare to what you've seen historically? A: When I got here in 1994, most schools were just coming out of a pretty funky job period from 1990 to 1993. My best guess is that this is equally as bad, if not a bit worse, than it was then. Q: What's your assessment of hiring in the investment-banking industry? A: Our niche in Wall Street is on the fixed-income side of the world, typically in the sales and trading areas. If you think of equities vs. fixed-income, it's the bond side or the fixed-income side that is relatively strong on the Street. That's where most of our graduates are. So we're affected just like everybody else is. But the hemorrhaging on the Street hasn't been as bad for us. At many other schools, people are moving to other segments, such as private-client services or the true dealmaking, investment-banking side of the equation. Now, we do have people there. So I'm not trying to make it sound like we're not affected. We are. But the side of the banks that are being most successful right now are the sides where most of our graduates are. Q: Are you seeing any increase in hiring from management-consulting firms? A: So far in 2003, we have four accepts with McKinsey. Last year, we had three. In 2001, we had eight. With Booz Allen, we have three accepts. Last year none, the year before, eight. At Deloitte, we had two hires this year, three last year, and 12 in 2001. At PriceWaterhouseCoopers, two in 2003, zero in 2002, and eight in 2001. So you get the picture: This year is a little bit better than last year with the leading firms. But we're still pale by comparison with where we were in the last pretty decent year. Q: Is prior experience in an industry a big leg up in the MBA job hunt these days? A: Right now, that's absolutely correct. Those firms that are still recruiting have much smaller appetites than they did in years past. It's just common sense. If you and I, in our own businesses, were going to hire somebody to work for us, and if we had a choice of two talented people, and someone had relevant experience in the same function or the same industry and the other person doesn't, you hire the experienced one. You want to get as much as you can for the bucks you're going to spend. Q: So what do people do if they want to change careers? A: They're having much more difficulty. The two groups of people facing the most challenges in the job market are career changers and international students. The key is just good old-fashioned, basic job-search skills -- developing a focus for what you want to do, figuring out where you can fit in well. It's as basic as understanding what your interests are, what your skills are, and what kinds of things are important to you. Then, identify the companies and industries that might be able to give you what you want, and learn as much about them as you can. One of our alumni is a managing director at a fixed-income desk for Goldman Sachs in Japan. He came back to Carnegie Mellon to recruit for his company and he said: "The way I broke in was that I found out who the lead players were on the Street. I researched the kinds of things that they were writing and publishing, and learned as much about that stuff as I could. Then I started to communicate with them about it." Q: Is Carnegie Mellon doing anything differently to deal with special concerns that international students might have? A: One of the first questions I ask any international student when I sit down to work with them -- knowing what our own economy is like -- I say, "Is the economy any better in the country you come from than it is here?" Only one group of students, by the way, gives me an affirmative answer -- students from China. They feel that the opportunities back there are much more significant right now than they are here in the States. Two industries that frequently will absorb a good percentage of the international students are consulting and the banking industry. The relative demise of those two industries recently makes it more challenging to place internationals. One of the things that we do is try to get the international students to focus on situations where their background or skills are an advantage. I'm not just talking about my job-specific skills, but also about language skills and cultural understanding. I was doing work with a student from Japan yesterday, and trying to get him to identify Japanese companies doing business in the U.S. or U.S. companies doing business in Japan or greater Asia. And when you start to think that way, then you start focusing on a group of employers who regard you as an asset rather than a liability.
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