1u29
17-05-2007, 04:03 AM
The MBA Bull Market Has Legs
Thursday May 10, 8:08 am ET
By Alison Damast
MBA students continue to be in an enviable position in this year's job market, riding the crest of a two-year uptick in hiring. Recruiters said they plan to increase their hiring of MBA graduates by 18% this year, the second consecutive yearly rise, according to a new report released last week by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), an international association of business schools and sponsor of the GMAT. However, the recruiters anticipate trimming the number of jobs aimed at people completing undergraduate degrees this year by more than 7%.
"All of this is good news to a young person studying for an MBA. It means that there is going to be more competition for the same population," said Dave Wilson, president and chief executive officer of GMAC. "With this competition, recruiters are getting more aggressive and creative."
B-school students can expect to make more than their other graduate school counterparts. Recruiters said they plan to offer annual base salaries that are 28% higher than what they will offer to candidates with other types of graduate degrees. MBA students will earn 84% more than people with only an undergraduate education, up nine percentage points from last year.
Employers are leaning toward hiring more MBA students because they are looking for people with managerial and team experience, Wilson said. "If you talk to recruiters, they're looking at people who are good at motivating teams and people who can think strategically," Wilson said. "That's what they conclude they can find in the MBA graduates."
The study relied on responses from 1,382 recruiters, representing 1,029 companies around the world that hire MBAs or others with graduate business educations, and is consistent with an earlier study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers of a sharp rise in MBA hiring in 2007 (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/5/06, "Forecast: MBA Hiring Up Again").
Funky Names Don't Cut It
Speaking of jobs, are you looking for an easy way to get your job application taken out of the running? Then you should keep that "creative" e-mail address that has trailed you since college.
E-mail nicknames like Drunkensquirl@, bacardigirl@, and ifel4u@ are the type of unprofessional monikers that could cause a human resources screener to toss your r sum in the rejected pile, according to a recent study conducted at Ohio University.
"People don't think about it. They have developed this e-mail name in college and it just became their identity," said study author Kevin Tamanini, an industrial and organizational psychology doctoral candidate at Ohio who presented his findings at the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology conference in New York on Apr. 29.
Tamanini became interested in the topic after he noticed that more employers were asking job applicants to submit their r sum s online, he said. He undertook a study to find out, what, if any, impact an e-mail address can have on attitudes and perception of the applicant during the initial screening process.
To do this, he enlisted the help of 200 undergraduate students at Ohio University who were told to play the role of human resources representatives evaluating an individual for an available position. He asked them to evaluate real e-mail names that he had collected from students and judge them based on criteria such as success, popular fun, and degree of professionalism.
Of the 200 e-mail names evaluated, 99 were considered professional by survey participants, while the remaining 101 were deemed unprofessional. Among the names deemed unprofessional: Bighotdaddy@, gigglez217@, kittykat@, and barbie1999@, as well as the three mentioned earlier.
Having gleaned this information, Tamanini decided to take a deeper look into the issue. Would an e-mail address--professional or unprofessional--actually influence whether or not an applicant would be invited in for a company interview?
Once again, Tamanini sought out a group of undergraduates who were asked to imagine themselves as entry-level human resource screeners, working for a large company that advertises openings on an online job board. Their job was to screen r sum s and determine whether or not they would invite an applicant for an interview.
The students were asked to evaluate a high-quality r sum with a professional and unprofessional e-mail name, along with a low-quality r sum that followed the same parameters. The two professional names used were mharmon@ and jsmith888@.
In this case, it turned out that the quality of the r sum s mattered more to the students than the e-mail names, Tamanini said (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/13/07, "The Way to a Winning R sum "). "When it comes time to say, 'Should I let this person through to the next stage,' the quality of the r sum was more important," he said. "But at the next stage, the e-mail may come into play again."
Handing in a r sum with a quirky e-mail name may seem like a foolish move, but more people do it than you might think, said Tamanini, who has spoken with recruiters about this issue.
Don't let your e-mail address get in the way of your job applications, he recommends. When applying for a job, pick an e-mail address that is as "conventional" as you can muster, Tamanini says. Use your given name if you can or your initials with generic numbers, he suggests. "Don't try to be creative because there's no need to," he says. "Let your credentials speak for yourself, so your e-mail name doesn't have any influence. It's just your contact information and that's it."
Research Rankings
A recent annual ranking of research productivity at business schools found that faculty at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has published the most research in top academic journals over the past year. The rankings tracked the publications of professors at leading business schools in 24 of the field's leading academic journals from 2002 to 2006.
Until a few years ago, there wasn't a place where B-school academics could go to see how their schools stacked up against each other in terms of scholarly output. Hasan Pirkul, dean of the School of Management at the University of Texas-Dallas, set about to change that by creating a ranking system that measures research productivity at business schools.
"If you really talk to the deans of B-schools, particularly the top 100 business schools, they will all say that research is very, very important," Pirkul said. "This is a very powerful tool to basically understand in a research dimension how you are doing and how your school is evolving over time."
This is the third consecutive year that Wharton, which claimed authorship for 330 articles, topped the list. The Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University came in second with 220 articles, followed by Harvard Business School, with 168.
Several schools cracked the list's top 10 for the time this year, including the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Pirkul said he is not surprised that Wharton has remained at the top of the list for the past three years. "It's a direct reflection of the quality of the faculty and also a reflection of the size of the school," he said. "They happen to do well in the MBA rankings, they're a high quality school, and they deploy their resources well."
The rankings are weighted by the number of co-authors for each article, but they are not adjusted by the size of the school or faculty. "A smaller school that may have outstanding faculty is at a disadvantage," Pirkul conceded.
The rankings are part of a Web site the UT-Dallas School of Management created about five years ago to track academic research in business journals to see how Dallas compared to other business schools (it ranked 32nd, with 69 articles).
Chicago's Big Gift
University of Chicago alumnus Charles Harper has given the Graduate School of Business one of the largest private donations ever made to the university. Harper, a former chairman and chief executive of RJR Nabsico, asked that the size of the gift not be disclosed. The university is renaming the business-school building, now known as the Hyde Park Center, the Charles M. Harper Center. Harper received his MBA from the school in 1950. The state-of-the-art business-school building, completed in 2004, accommodates 1,100 full-time MBA students, in addition to PhD students and faculty. The business school is in the midst of a capital campaign and hopes to raise $300 million by next June, $283 million of which has already been raised, officials said.
Rutgers, Brandeis, Miami Name Deans
Rutgers Business School has named Michael Cooper as its new dean, effective June. Cooper served as the founding dean of the Executive Leadership Institute and associate dean of the Howe School of Technology Management at the Stevens Institute of Technology from 2002 to 2004. He is chair and managing partner of Cooper Interest, a company he founded in 1999 to provide private equity investments and strategy counsel to small and midsize companies. He will take over for Rosa Oppenheim, who has served as acting dean since last July.
Bruce Magid of the College of Business at San Jose State University was tapped as the new dean for Brandeis University's International Business School, effective July. Magid served as the founding executive director of Michigan State University Global, the school's online and global distance education business unit, before heading to San Jose to serve as dean. Magid will succeed F. Trenery Dolbear Jr., currently serving as acting dean of the business schools.
The University of Miami's School of Business Administration has picked Wharton Vice-Dean Barbara Kahn as its new dean, effective August. She succeeds Paul Sugrue, who will leave at the end of this year after 30 years at the school, 15 of which were spent as dean. Kahn is currently the Dorothy Silberberg Professor of Marketing and vice-dean and director of the undergraduate division at Wharton.
Source: businessweek online
Thursday May 10, 8:08 am ET
By Alison Damast
MBA students continue to be in an enviable position in this year's job market, riding the crest of a two-year uptick in hiring. Recruiters said they plan to increase their hiring of MBA graduates by 18% this year, the second consecutive yearly rise, according to a new report released last week by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), an international association of business schools and sponsor of the GMAT. However, the recruiters anticipate trimming the number of jobs aimed at people completing undergraduate degrees this year by more than 7%.
"All of this is good news to a young person studying for an MBA. It means that there is going to be more competition for the same population," said Dave Wilson, president and chief executive officer of GMAC. "With this competition, recruiters are getting more aggressive and creative."
B-school students can expect to make more than their other graduate school counterparts. Recruiters said they plan to offer annual base salaries that are 28% higher than what they will offer to candidates with other types of graduate degrees. MBA students will earn 84% more than people with only an undergraduate education, up nine percentage points from last year.
Employers are leaning toward hiring more MBA students because they are looking for people with managerial and team experience, Wilson said. "If you talk to recruiters, they're looking at people who are good at motivating teams and people who can think strategically," Wilson said. "That's what they conclude they can find in the MBA graduates."
The study relied on responses from 1,382 recruiters, representing 1,029 companies around the world that hire MBAs or others with graduate business educations, and is consistent with an earlier study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers of a sharp rise in MBA hiring in 2007 (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/5/06, "Forecast: MBA Hiring Up Again").
Funky Names Don't Cut It
Speaking of jobs, are you looking for an easy way to get your job application taken out of the running? Then you should keep that "creative" e-mail address that has trailed you since college.
E-mail nicknames like Drunkensquirl@, bacardigirl@, and ifel4u@ are the type of unprofessional monikers that could cause a human resources screener to toss your r sum in the rejected pile, according to a recent study conducted at Ohio University.
"People don't think about it. They have developed this e-mail name in college and it just became their identity," said study author Kevin Tamanini, an industrial and organizational psychology doctoral candidate at Ohio who presented his findings at the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology conference in New York on Apr. 29.
Tamanini became interested in the topic after he noticed that more employers were asking job applicants to submit their r sum s online, he said. He undertook a study to find out, what, if any, impact an e-mail address can have on attitudes and perception of the applicant during the initial screening process.
To do this, he enlisted the help of 200 undergraduate students at Ohio University who were told to play the role of human resources representatives evaluating an individual for an available position. He asked them to evaluate real e-mail names that he had collected from students and judge them based on criteria such as success, popular fun, and degree of professionalism.
Of the 200 e-mail names evaluated, 99 were considered professional by survey participants, while the remaining 101 were deemed unprofessional. Among the names deemed unprofessional: Bighotdaddy@, gigglez217@, kittykat@, and barbie1999@, as well as the three mentioned earlier.
Having gleaned this information, Tamanini decided to take a deeper look into the issue. Would an e-mail address--professional or unprofessional--actually influence whether or not an applicant would be invited in for a company interview?
Once again, Tamanini sought out a group of undergraduates who were asked to imagine themselves as entry-level human resource screeners, working for a large company that advertises openings on an online job board. Their job was to screen r sum s and determine whether or not they would invite an applicant for an interview.
The students were asked to evaluate a high-quality r sum with a professional and unprofessional e-mail name, along with a low-quality r sum that followed the same parameters. The two professional names used were mharmon@ and jsmith888@.
In this case, it turned out that the quality of the r sum s mattered more to the students than the e-mail names, Tamanini said (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/13/07, "The Way to a Winning R sum "). "When it comes time to say, 'Should I let this person through to the next stage,' the quality of the r sum was more important," he said. "But at the next stage, the e-mail may come into play again."
Handing in a r sum with a quirky e-mail name may seem like a foolish move, but more people do it than you might think, said Tamanini, who has spoken with recruiters about this issue.
Don't let your e-mail address get in the way of your job applications, he recommends. When applying for a job, pick an e-mail address that is as "conventional" as you can muster, Tamanini says. Use your given name if you can or your initials with generic numbers, he suggests. "Don't try to be creative because there's no need to," he says. "Let your credentials speak for yourself, so your e-mail name doesn't have any influence. It's just your contact information and that's it."
Research Rankings
A recent annual ranking of research productivity at business schools found that faculty at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has published the most research in top academic journals over the past year. The rankings tracked the publications of professors at leading business schools in 24 of the field's leading academic journals from 2002 to 2006.
Until a few years ago, there wasn't a place where B-school academics could go to see how their schools stacked up against each other in terms of scholarly output. Hasan Pirkul, dean of the School of Management at the University of Texas-Dallas, set about to change that by creating a ranking system that measures research productivity at business schools.
"If you really talk to the deans of B-schools, particularly the top 100 business schools, they will all say that research is very, very important," Pirkul said. "This is a very powerful tool to basically understand in a research dimension how you are doing and how your school is evolving over time."
This is the third consecutive year that Wharton, which claimed authorship for 330 articles, topped the list. The Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University came in second with 220 articles, followed by Harvard Business School, with 168.
Several schools cracked the list's top 10 for the time this year, including the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Pirkul said he is not surprised that Wharton has remained at the top of the list for the past three years. "It's a direct reflection of the quality of the faculty and also a reflection of the size of the school," he said. "They happen to do well in the MBA rankings, they're a high quality school, and they deploy their resources well."
The rankings are weighted by the number of co-authors for each article, but they are not adjusted by the size of the school or faculty. "A smaller school that may have outstanding faculty is at a disadvantage," Pirkul conceded.
The rankings are part of a Web site the UT-Dallas School of Management created about five years ago to track academic research in business journals to see how Dallas compared to other business schools (it ranked 32nd, with 69 articles).
Chicago's Big Gift
University of Chicago alumnus Charles Harper has given the Graduate School of Business one of the largest private donations ever made to the university. Harper, a former chairman and chief executive of RJR Nabsico, asked that the size of the gift not be disclosed. The university is renaming the business-school building, now known as the Hyde Park Center, the Charles M. Harper Center. Harper received his MBA from the school in 1950. The state-of-the-art business-school building, completed in 2004, accommodates 1,100 full-time MBA students, in addition to PhD students and faculty. The business school is in the midst of a capital campaign and hopes to raise $300 million by next June, $283 million of which has already been raised, officials said.
Rutgers, Brandeis, Miami Name Deans
Rutgers Business School has named Michael Cooper as its new dean, effective June. Cooper served as the founding dean of the Executive Leadership Institute and associate dean of the Howe School of Technology Management at the Stevens Institute of Technology from 2002 to 2004. He is chair and managing partner of Cooper Interest, a company he founded in 1999 to provide private equity investments and strategy counsel to small and midsize companies. He will take over for Rosa Oppenheim, who has served as acting dean since last July.
Bruce Magid of the College of Business at San Jose State University was tapped as the new dean for Brandeis University's International Business School, effective July. Magid served as the founding executive director of Michigan State University Global, the school's online and global distance education business unit, before heading to San Jose to serve as dean. Magid will succeed F. Trenery Dolbear Jr., currently serving as acting dean of the business schools.
The University of Miami's School of Business Administration has picked Wharton Vice-Dean Barbara Kahn as its new dean, effective August. She succeeds Paul Sugrue, who will leave at the end of this year after 30 years at the school, 15 of which were spent as dean. Kahn is currently the Dorothy Silberberg Professor of Marketing and vice-dean and director of the undergraduate division at Wharton.
Source: businessweek online