This year's class of MBAs arrived on campus in September expecting a challenging fall recruiting season and now many are bracing themselves for an even tougher spring ahead. One of them is Aashini Shah, an MBA student looking for a job in the entertainment industry, who is feeling the pressure because most movie studios and entertainment companies don't hire until the spring. To get an edge, she's spent every spare moment she has networking with alumni, going on informational interviews, and keeping in touch with the contacts she made last summer, she says.
"It is slightly nerve-wracking now in the sense that there are only going to be so many positions available and that there are many people from the class of '09 that are still unemployed," says Shah, 29, a second-year student at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business (Marshall Full-Time MBA Profile), who interned at Disney (DIS) last summer. "Not only will you be vying with your own classmates, but you are vying with the class behind you for the same job."
With uncertainty about the economic recovery looming, students trying to secure full-time offers are entering a job climate that looks eerily similar to last year's brutal MBA job market, career services officers say. Compounding the problem, fewer second-year students came back this fall with full-time job offers from their internships, they say, making an already tight job market even more competitive. This fall, recruiters continued to shy away from campus and many are being cautious about hiring, according to a recent survey of 78 business schools by the MBA Career Services Council (MBA CSC), the umbrella group for business school career placement officers. Recruiting remains down, with 79% of schools reporting a decline in on-campus recruiting for full-time MBA jobs in the fall of 2009, the same number as the previous year. To assist students, career services officers are using many of the same tactics they used last year to dig up jobs. They're cold-calling recruiters, adding executives in residence to counsel MBAs, and tapping into alumni networks. Meanwhile, they're preparing students to seize on what they believe could be a last-minute flood of job opportunities that they expect will emerge closer to graduation.
At the same time, there are a number of signs that the MBA job market could improve, albeit slightly, in the coming months and a growing sense of optimism prevails among career services officers, says Kip Harrell, president of the MBA CSC. According to his group's survey, full-time MBA job postings appear to be rebounding; 34% of schools reported an increase in full-time postings this fall. And, perhaps even more important, fewer schools are reporting declines, with 48% of schools seeing a reduction in full-time postings, as compared with 70% of schools last year.
The still-shaky job market is a bitter pill for many MBA students, who came to B-school 18 months ago in the hope that the recession would be long gone by graduation and are now finding that it isn't. The surge in B-school applications at the start of the downturn was one of the biggest on record, as many fled the uncertainty of the job market for what they viewed as a surefire career boost and six-figure salary. Today, that all seems like a cruel joke, but on campus a fragile optimism prevails. "We are seeing signs that the economy is turning around, so the mood at business schools now is that everyone is waiting with lots of hope," says Harrell.
Another bright spot is that internship opportunities for first-year students may be bouncing back. In the survey by the MBA CSC, 31% of career services officers say they expect internship recruiting activity to be down, while 33% expect it to be up and 36% expect it to be flat. Last year at this time, 62% of career services officers said they expected internship activity to be down.
"It is definitely an improvement over last year," says Harrell, vice-president for professional and career management at the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Thunderbird Full-Time MBA Profile). "We do expect the internship process to run longer than usual this year, with some just-in-time internships coming up going into the summer."
Many first-year students came into business school this fall anticipating that it would be difficult to land an internship, says Joyce Rothenberg, director of the Career Management Center at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management (Owen Full-Time MBA Profile). With fewer recruiters visiting campus, she encouraged her first-year students to attend national MBA conferences this fall, venues where they would get exposure to a larger cohort of companies. Some students decided to take her advice; she had a group of 25 first-year students go to the National Society of Hispanic MBAs Conference this fall, some of whom were able to secure job leads and internship offers, she says.
"I think my first-year students were expecting it to be tough, so they've been more creative about their internship searches," she says.
On the full-time job front, career services officers say they are encouraged by small signs of progress. Michelle Antonio, director of MBA career management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (Wharton Full-Time MBA Profile), says she has seen double-digit growth in off-campus job postings on the school's job board, despite a slight decline in the number of employers that came to campus this fall. Another encouraging sign? More second-year students appear to have accepted full-time job offers now than last year at this time; of those, many have come from on-campus recruiting opportunities, she notes.
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