Preparing for the Post-Business School Workforce

• Group projects and interactions with peers help students develop collaboration, influence, and teamwork skills necessary in professional environments.
• Recent grads may encounter a steeper learning curve than expected, requiring them to be more agile as they adapt to company-specific cultures and processes, such as promotion and reward structures.
• With a better understanding of how to use technology to its best advantage, students will be poised for success on the job.

Transcript

Parker Laue: [00:15] One of the key ways my education has helped me was teaching me critical thinking and interpersonal skills. I think so often in my day-to-day job, it’s not so much 'what' I learned in school, but 'how' I learned to think and solve complex problems.

[00:27] How do you address problems that you don’t know the answer to and break them down into something you can solve? And learning to do that when it’s uncomfortable and you don’t exactly know what to do.

[00:36] One of the most helpful parts was when you do that in a group setting. Work in a corporate setting is often a large group project.

[00:43] And so in a school setting, when you’re working with peers, having to interact with a client—your teacher—you really are learning some of those invaluable skills of: how do you work as a team, how do you collaborate, how do you have influence and get projects done to meet a common goal? And those are some of the most important skills I learned in school.

When you get in a job, you come with a lot of great useful skills, but you still have to learn how each company operates, their culture, and specifics of the role.

[1:01] My expectations from work differed from reality in a few ways. One of the biggest ways is I expected that I would be more valuable on day one of my job. I think that there was a steeper learning curve than I realized.

[01:12] I think when you get in a job, you come with a lot of great useful skills, but you still have to learn how each company operates, their culture, specifics of the role, and I think it was having an appropriate mindset and expectation of, I can bring a lot of value, but it’s probably not going to be in the first 30 minutes I show up at the company.

[01:29] One of the other big expectations was that the pace of promotion, raises, those things work at a different pace than most of my academic life. Companies are influenced by economics, the market, and promotion isn’t always about how well I performed. It’s sometimes about bigger trends and bigger things.

[01:47] That’s been a hard lesson to learn, that you have to keep doing a good job even when the reward may be delayed and the positive feedback may come months, even years, after you did great work.

[01:58] One of the areas there’s opportunity for business school graduates to deliver more value in a corporate setting is complex problem-solving. And that’s typically when you’re thinking about technology.

[02:10] Let’s think about whatever the latest technology trend is, like AI. How do business students think about it and understand it well enough to really make informed decisions?

One of the areas there’s opportunity for business school graduates to deliver more value in a corporate setting is complex problem-solving.

[02:19] It’s very easy, when you solve a complex problem around technology, for them to not be able to really dive in and dig in enough to solve it well, or to just address it at a high level.

[02:29] And so having enough understanding, enough technical aptitude, and understanding of it will give them a much better ability to create value.

[02:38] And often, I think many companies, when they hire young people, there’s an expectation that you kind of understand technology. And so people may be projecting their expectation of you better understanding technology than you actually do.

[02:52] But I think there’s a huge opportunity for the next generation of business school graduates to take up that mantle and really help show how can technology be used and be willing to understand it, maybe a little bit more deeply than predecessors of business school graduates have, because it’s increasingly needed, and it’s a huge opportunity for them.