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Andrew Storey considered himself one of the lucky ones when he graduated from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in 2008. Even though the economic downturn had made it tough for many MBAs to find jobs, he landed a plum position as a London-based consultant with Booz & Co., where he’d interned the previous summer. But like many consulting companies at the time, Booz was hit hard by the economic downturn, and Storey says recent hires began to worry about their jobs as project work began to slow. Says Storey: “It was one of those things where you could see the writing on the wall.”
His worst fears were realized in the fall of 2009, when he and about 100 other workers in the London office, many also recent MBA graduates, were laid off. Rather than flounder around in the job market looking for a similar gig, Storey chose to reinvent himself, taking a job with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, where he had volunteered in the past. “When things were going bad at Booz, I didn’t sit back and say, ‘Why is this happening to me? I’ve done everything right,’ ” says Storey, who has since been promoted. “You roll with it and see where it takes you.”
Just how unique is Storey’s tale? Turns out his nimble approach to the roiling job market was fairly common among his peers from the MBA class of 2008, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of the career paths taken by 1,000 graduates from that class. We randomly chose 30 graduates from each of the 30 top-ranked U.S. MBA programs and 10 graduates from each of the top 10 international programs. Current job data were collected from LinkedIn profiles and compared to the jobs reported by respondents in the 2008 Bloomberg Businessweek MBA student survey. Of the 889 students for whom data were available, 393, or 44 percent, had changed employers since graduating. The remaining 496 graduates, or 56 percent, were still at their first post-MBA employers, with about half of those, or 52 percent, having changed jobs within their respective companies.
Exactly what this means is uncertain. Are the 111 graduates without LinkedIn profiles unemployed, or just private? Did those who changed employers advance their careers, or grab the first available job? And after three years in the job market, how does the Class of 2008 compare to those that came before?
Harvard economist Richard Freeman, who also serves as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, says the number of people changing employers seems high for a recession, when most people tend to stay put in their current jobs. However, he believes that many business school graduates likely settled for less-than-ideal jobs when they graduated, and were quick to jump on more promising opportunities when they came along. Says Freeman: “They took a short hit and maybe they never got back to quite as good a job as they would have gotten had they come out of school during a boom period.”
MBA Career Services Council President Nicole Hall agrees that 2008 graduates appear to have moved on to a second job at a higher rate than normal. The economic downturn probably had the most impact on career switchers, as employers became more reluctant to hire graduates with limited experience in the industry, says Hall, who also serves as the executive director of alumni and career services at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. As a result, these students were forced to take a lower wage or title than they would have liked in order to enter the field. “That was probably the most difficult part for the Class of 2008,” Hall says. “Their opportunities were limited, and from that standpoint they didn’t have a lot of flexibility.”
©2011 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
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