How MBAs Can Prepare for the Future of Work

/ Career Transitions, MBA Alum / By

Everywhere you look, someone is talking about the future of work. For example, here are six reports I read when I wrote this article. 

In case you don’t want to read them, here is a useful summary:

The world of work is changing, and companies and employees must adapt to thrive in the new world. These changes are due to a variety of factors, including but not limited to:

  • An accelerating and continuous pace of change in each industry;
  • Advancements in technology and automation;
  • The changing nature of careers (RIP the traditional career model); and
  • The evolution of employer-employee relationships (freelancers, gig-economy, etc).

How Can You Prepare For The Future of Work?

Preparing for Your Post-MBA Career in the Future of Work

To succeed in this rapidly changing world, MBA students and MBA Alum (and future employees and leaders) must focus on constantly developing new skills and proactive career management. The good news is that an MBA education is a fantastic place to energetically build the skills you need to thrive in the future of work. With ample opportunities to learn, it can be hard to know where to start. Here are recommendations for how MBAs can prepare for the future of work.

#1: Build your power skills  

For a long time, soft skills have gotten a bad name, but in the future of work, soft skills are tremendously valuable, so much so that HR analyst Josh Bersin calls them power skills. These are core skills that, while “soft,” can be incredibly hard to master. But if you master them, they will give you immense power, as you can apply them across all roles, jobs, and industries. Examples of these skills include the following:

Source: Business Value Global Skill Survey, IBM

  • Willingness to be flexible, agile and adaptable to change;
  • Time management and the ability to prioritize;
  • Ability to work effectively in team environments;
  • Ability communicate effectively in business context; and
  • Analytics skills and business acumen.

The good news is that business school gives you ample opportunities to work on power skills. Every group project is a chance to practice working on diverse teams. Leading a club or student organization is all about cross-functional leadership and teaming as well as influencing without authority. By the time you graduate business school you’ll have had numerous opportunities to communicate to diverse groups of audiences. My suggestion is to pick a few of these and look for as many opportunities to practice them as you can. 

Finally, a quick note on soft skills: These are not skills you can just pick up by reading a book, listening to a podcast or taking an online course (although those can be good starting points). To really build your soft skills, you’ll want to have:

  1. Repetition – Deliberate practice and reps over a period of time.
  2. Feedback – Feedback helps you understand what you did well and how you can do it better.
  3. Friends – Learning is inherently social. This is what makes the cohort model so special in business school.
  4. Time – It’s hard to learn something overnight.

 

#2: Embrace Authentic Networking and Relationship-building

Even as we move to a world where robots play a greater role in the workplace, one thing is clear: work is incredibly human. Getting any kind of work done in a global and technologically advanced society requires working with others. Since many MBA students end up going to large multinational companies after graduation, the ability to work well with others, either as a leader or as a contributor to cross functional projects, is critically important. 

 

Business school is a perfect time to hone your cross functional teamwork and collaboration skills. 

  • Influence without authority – Lead a club or student organization, even when you are in a leadership role in which nobody reports to you.
  • Empathy – Learn how to think and see the perspective of other people on a group project, consulting project, or in a global immersion program.
  • Cross Functional Teaming – Work on assignments inside and outside the classroom that requires you to work with others toward a common goal.

 

#3: Pivot to agile thinking and working 

In a fast-moving environment, employees need to become more agile and nimble just like companies. A case in point is every employee who had to pivot their way of working as a result of COVID-19. To do this, employees take a “test and learn” approach, where they quickly engage in small experiments, and use the successes and failures to drive new experiments and decisions. 

This mindset is very similar to the agile development approach to product development that software developers and product managers use to test and iterate as they build new products.

Here, the goal is to quickly learn through smaller experiments that can then be used to continue iterating and testing down the same path, or perhaps a new one. Experiments can be anything, such as having an informational interview with someone in your desired field, taking a class related to an industry you are interested in, or signing on to an internship. 

The goal is not only to do a small experiment quickly, but to be able to do it and learn from the experience. You will then use those learnings to inform additional decisions as well as opportunities you embrace. While an internship is a great example, other experiments, such as consulting projects, working with a startup, or participating in field studies, research projects, or other group engagements, can be great opportunities as well. 

#4: Build Your Expertise

I’m going to try to avoid a conversation around building your brand/networking (although I do think it is important). Instead, I’ll talk more about building your expertise and sharing it with the broader audience you hope to engage with. The MBA is a generalist degree. By getting a broad understanding of business, you have the knowledge needed to tackle diverse sets of problems that your future role may throw at you. That’s critically important. But one thing MBAs can do is to start thinking about areas or domains of expertise they want to be known in. They can use the time in business school to start formulating their thoughts and ideas. 

In her book The Expertise Economy, Kelly Palmer, Chief Learning Officer at Degreed, writes that “expertise is the most important asset any organization can have.” Since the workplace is evolving so fast and skills and competencies are quickly becoming out of date, companies will need people who can develop expertise quickly and apply that expertise to think of new ideas, products and offerings.

In a digital world, there are more ways than ever to share ideas and thoughts with the universe, such as:

  • Start a blog;
  • Start an email newsletter on Substack;
  • Interview experts in your chosen area of expertise and write about your learnings; and
  • Build a side project, app, website, or portfolio of your work.

Ideally, whatever you choose to build your expertise in and around should be something that is of interest and excitement to you. Furthermore, the methods above are all meant as various modes and mediums to share the work you create and your insights/POV. The great thing about this is that it is pretty low cost, and it compounds over time. The more you invest, the more value it pays down the road. (If you want to know how to build your expertise, check out Dorie Clark’s work.) 

Not sure where to start? Take some guidance from Nick de Wilde and  consider an audience first approach. That is – figure out who you want to get to know and speak to, identify topics that are of interest to them, and start writing and producing ideas that resonate with that audience.  What audience do you want to be associated with? Said another way, who are the people you want to be engaging with? For example, if you want to work in Venture Capital with a focus on IT Security startups, then start writing blogs and engaging on Twitter with VC’s who focus on those topics.

Another way to figure out your expertise is to ask yourself the question, “If someone were to pay me $10,000 to provide advice on something, what would it be?” 

#5: Deploy continuous learning

With industries and businesses changing, one way to keep up is to continuously acquire new skills and competencies. Doing this means you need to “learn how to learn” so that you can find new ways to apply your existing skills, or to find new skills altogether.  According to research from Deloitte, the half life of a learned skill is now 4.5 years. So how will you ensure you can quickly learn and acquire new skills?

Put this into practice by identifying the ways in which you learn and acquire new skills, and then apply that to the next time you have to learn something new. There are endless opportunities in today’s digital age to learn new skills, concepts and competencies. 

Ideally, learning is a mix of both theory and practical action, so make sure to find a good balance between the two. Inherit in learning is also an element of resourcefulness and the ability to acquire information, skills and insights that can be helpful to your learning. 

A great example of this comes from Fuqua MBA student Austin Carroll. During her first year at Fuqua, Austin’s first internship was rescinded due to Covid-19. Fortunately, she was able to find another one by using her network. But after finding the internship she realized that there were so many more opportunities than just a summer internship. In addition to finding another internship, Austin took four online classes, brushed up on coding languages, launched a mobile app, took on a fall internship with a media and entertainment company, started a spring internship with a Startup Accelerator, participated in a Hospitality Investment Competition. Austin went on to add, “Strangely enough, I didn’t do these things to get a job. We spend so much time in business school thinking about recruitment outcomes that we rarely get time to feed our curiosity.” Carroll added.

According to futurist Heather McGowan (Babson, ‘01), “the winners in the future of work share a mindset, not a skill set, characterized by an understanding that learning is a lifelong job.” McGowan went on to add, “It means not necessarily having the right answers, but always asking questions and making connections.”  

#6: Be proactive about career development

Putting your head down and staying busy in your work is no longer enough. To be successful, you need to be proactive with your own career development by taking it into your own hands. As Carter Cast rightfully notes, “Ideally, organizations would do more to foster career development, but the reality is that the bigger burden is on employees.” 

You’ll still need to rely on others and build relationships to make some of these things happen. But in a fast-changing environment those who aren’t planning ahead are missing out on opportunities. And those who are letting their employers define their career development are potentially sacrificing their own goals, purpose and aspirations.

To be clear, many companies and employers will still provide training and invest in their MBA hires when they arrive at the company. Microsoft, Bain and P&G will still prepare you very well for your first MBA job. But those who take ownership will not only be able to thrive in their immediate post-MBA job, but when it does come time to identify a new career opportunity, they’ll be best positioned to seize it.

Business school gives you time to build out your “career development toolbox.” This is a toolbox of metaskills that will be helpful to you for the rest of your career. Examples include:

  • Learning how to pitch and position yourself for a job; 
  • Conducting an informational interview;
  • Reflecting on your skills and strengths and how they fit within a job;
  • Assessing a career opportunity against your own goals and objectives; and
  • Interviewing with managers and executives.

Furthermore, having time and space to reflect on what you’ve already done, what your strengths are, and where you want to go next are critical tenets of career development. Fortunately, your time in business school will provide you with these opportunities for reflection.

Finally, there’s a reality that MBA students should understand. While it’s important to celebrate landing that first post-MBA job, 99.5% of MBA students who graduate from business school will eventually move onto another job at some point in their career. This means that these career development skills that you acquire in business school will be valuable far beyond the two-year education, which makes it even more critical to start sharpening them while you are in school.

Conclusion

In a fast-changing and uncertain world, we cannot predict the future. However, with foresight, agility and action we can take steps to prepare ourselves with the skills needed to be successful, to adapt, and to evolve our careers as the industry and markets we serve change with time. MBA students have a great opportunity to learn with a cohort of peers, in an environment with amazing resources, and with endless opportunities to learn and grow. MBA students have the chance to build the skills they need to be prepared and thrive in the future of work.