In Search of Jobs, MBAs Take Off the Gloves

A dismal job market has MBA students, graduates, and alumni competing like never before. The only rule: There are no rules

By Mandy Oaklander

For MBAs, the business world was, not so long ago, a manicured and paradisal Eden. Success was achieved through a series of necessarily ordered steps: acceptance into business school, an internship, a full-time job, a wealthy retirement. But in a span of just two years, the MBA playing field has morphed into a chaotic jungle. Jobs seem near extinction. The old system of progression is broken. The new king of the jungle is determined by whoever wins the job hunt—and MBAs are stopping at nothing to get to the prize.

In this Darwinian struggle for gainful employment, first-years are competing with unemployed second-years for internships, paid and unpaid. Second-years are doing battle with recent alumni who have been laid off in recent months as well as older alumni whose big salaries make them easy targets for cutbacks. And with desperate MBAs changing careers, going downmarket, or otherwise shifting to Plan B, business school graduates everywhere are now up against a vast army of the uncredentialed jobless.

Brent Simon, 30, just earned his MBA this May from Cornell University's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management (Johnson Full-Time MBA Profile). Graduating with a job, he counts himself among the lucky ones. But Simon's no stranger to the tumultuous job search. In December of his first year, he had secured an internship with a real estate company, and by April he found himself with nothing. He landed an internship at the very last minute that led to a full-time job offer. "In the olden days, your primary competition were classmates and kids at other good business schools," Simon says. "Now, we have the 200,000 other people who lost their jobs."

The trickle-down effect of that added competition is to create a sort of no-holds-barred job market for MBA talent. The old pecking order is gone. And success requires new strategies.

Alumni

Richard Lane, a 54-year-old recently unemployed alum from the Wharton School (Wharton Full-Time MBA Profile) at the University of Pennsylvania, serves as the president emeritus of the Wharton Club of Boston. Though he himself is jobless, he advises job-hungry alumni on where to find employment in Boston, matching them with professionals from his extensive network.

Lane, who describes himself as a "serial entrepreneur," has been out of work since October, when he voluntarily left a tech company where he was interim CEO. He admits that his investment in the leadership of the club is largely due to the fact that he's looking for a job. "I'm the facilitator as well as the client in the scenario," he says. And while Lane's allegiance lies in helping the members of the club, he cannot ignore the pressing needs of his own job search. He says that he'll only pass along jobs that he rejects as possibilities for himself. "What I haven't done is introduce someone to a job that I want," he says.

Like many Wharton grads who find themselves suddenly between jobs, Lane has availed himself of the services offered by Wharton's alumni career services office. Over the past year, the office has seen a 21% increase in the number of appointments conducted with alumni—some 4,000 in all. The advisers offer everything from tips on how to improve interview techniques to rewriting résumés. "I actually about a year ago had hired a consultant to help me, and I paid big bucks. Here, I'm getting it for free with someone at Wharton," Lane says.

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