Working as a consultant in the pharmaceuticals industry, Joseph Fitzgibbon wasn’t exactly in a dead end job. But he wasn’t happy with the direction his career was heading either.
“You know when you’re looking at your bosses and your clients and you don’t want either of their jobs, you’ve got a bit of a problem,” he says.
So in 2012 he joined the thousands of other young, ambitious Britons who each year stump up eye-watering fees for an MBA – in his case London Business School’s two-year course, which as of this year would set you back £78,500. “It is a risk because you’re fundamentally quitting your job and hoping it works out in the end,” he admits. In his case, the gamble paid off.
After graduating in 2014 he bagged a strategy job at drinks giant Diageo (and a 50pc pay rise) and has since gone on to hold senior roles at fast growing start-ups Graze and Clickmechanic.
Stories like Fitzgibbon’s explain why MBAs remain popular, with 75pc of UK courses experiencing a rise in applications last year, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council.
MBAs in numbers
But with business models and the world of work changing at such a rapid pace, business schools face a battle to convince students it’s worth dedicating a year or two of their career and tens of thousands of pounds to a course whose content may soon be out of date.
Even as things stand, MBAs are not without their detractors. “Never ever hire an MBA. They will ruin your company,” the PayPal founder and Silicon Valley venture capital veteran Peter Thiel once reportedly warned.
But for the time being, they remain popular among many employers, including at the most senior levels – 30pc of FTSE 100 bosses had one last year according to research by headhunters Heidrick & Struggles.
“[Hiring MBAs] is about bringing in different ideas, innovative and creative thinkers,” says Colette Dennehy, a recruiter at drugs giant GSK. “They’ve invested in themselves through doing the MBA and we’re trying to tap into those capabilities.”
A big chunk of top MBA graduates end up working at financial institutions and consulting firms, but recently the growth in hiring has mostly been coming from the technology sector.
Ecommerce giant Amazon snapped up a thousand of them in 2017, with Google and Apple not far behind.
“What’s really valued in tech is the ability to be a generalist that can take on any problems … because in tech no two problems are the same,” says Serhat Pakyuz, who also studied at LBS and was one of Amazon’s hires last year. Not all MBAs are created equal, however, with the top schools such as Harvard, Wharton, Oxford and LBS being able to command fees several times higher than those further down the league tables on account of their big-name lecturers and deep-pocketed employers, and particularly the value of the contacts they allow students to create – both in person and through their alumni networks.