Strong MBA Recruiting On the Way, Predicts New GMAC Poll
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Certainly, the 2023 recruiting season wasn’t exactly the best for MBA hiring in recent years.
But now, a new survey reports optimistic projections that predict strong hiring.
That’s largely because employer confidence in graduate management education (GME) and its capacity to prepare business school graduates for success has achieved new heights since the pandemic.
In July, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) released the Corporate Recruiters Survey. The organization has conducted this poll every year for the past two decades. This year, over 1,000 employers—half from Fortune 500 companies—participated from the United States as well as 37 other nations around the world.
GMAC observed that boost in confidence among the MBA recruiters in several key industries to which business education traditionally has catered—such as management consulting, finance, and public accounting. Plus GMAC also observed that confidence boost among recruiters from the technology industry as well.
Moreover, the good news for business school applicants and students lies in how that renewed confidence translates into bullish employment projections. Specifically, GMAC’s new data shows that most global MBA recruiters now plan steady or expanded hiring during the remainder of 2024 and into 2025. What’s more, about 33 percent even expect to hire more MBA graduates than they did during 2023.
That buoyant confidence also appears among many employers who reported to the Council that business school alumni tend to outperform and earn more than their other employees and typically win faster promotions to higher-level positions. GMAC appears to argue that these alumni consistently accomplish these results mainly because their business schools trained them in four critical competencies highly valued by MBA employers:
- Problem-solving
- Communication
- Strategic thinking
- Interpersonal/teamwork skills
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on MBA Skills
Employers also reported that the alumni proportion has grown in the past few years despite—or possibly because of—the rapid rise of new technological advances such as generative artificial intelligence. Currently, not many of the employer survey respondents believe that the changes resulting from AI have as yet affected their organizations—and that’s especially the case here in the United States.
Overall, only about a quarter of the employers believe that AI skills are important for MBAs and other new hires with graduate management degrees to leverage at present. The share of employers who told GMAC that AI is currently important for those graduates was lowest in the United States (13 percent), but highest in Central and South Asia (49 percent). Among industries, that share was also highest in the technology sector (36 percent).
GMAC sought to understand what these AI-concerned employers currently wanted the GME graduates they hire to do with their artificial intelligence skills. So the Council then asked these employers to explain the reasons why they considered these AI skills to be so important right now.
It turns out that 29 percent or fewer want the GME graduates they hire to use AI to generate content in writing, images, or videos. Instead, about two-thirds want these grads to use AI to develop business strategies and make decisions, or to acquire knowledge and learn new business skills. It’s not entirely clear how such knowledge acquisition differs from conducting research, for which more than half of the employers also said they wanted graduates to use AI.
GMAC then asked the employers which skills would be important in five years. By contrast, generative artificial intelligence skills shot way up to fourth place on that list, compared with their ranking in the cellar this year in 21st position.
Yet on the 2029 list, AI still ranked behind problem-solving and strategic thinking as the poll’s top two core competencies. According to GMAC, these are the critical skills for managers valued as essential around the world, both today and five years from now as well.
Joy Jones—GMAC’s new chief executive officer—said in a prepared statement explaining these survey results that:
As disruptive technologies like generative AI reshape the labor market and the skill economy expands, employers are putting a premium on strategic thinking, people leadership, and problem-solving while betting on the rising importance of tech prowess.
To achieve success, future business leaders will need to harness technological advancements and possess the knowledge and experience to manage the change brought on by these evolutions. This year’s Corporate Recruiters Survey affirms that graduate business programs continue to be uniquely positioned—and trusted for their ability—to develop business talent with increasingly relevant and cutting-edge skills, who are equipped to tackle new and perennial challenges with a balance of tech and human understanding.
Did GMAC’s Methodology Skew the AI Results?
It would be remiss of us not to point out some ways in which this survey’s methodology may have affected its overly optimistic insights and analyses about artificial intelligence skills.
The poll’s fieldwork appears to have been conducted during January and February of 2024, but the results weren’t published until the following July. That’s a very long, six-month lead time compared with many polls these days that publish results less than a month following the completion of their fieldwork.
That long lead time is significant because the polling got underway almost nine months before several respected authorities started to raise concerns about the staggering $150 billion worth of investments by businesses around the world in AI-related hardware, software, and services during 2024.
A Boston Globe op-ed by Peter Cohan, a management professor at Babson College, argued that that despite all these investments, “companies are also terrified of being sued if the technology hallucinates.”
Professor Cohan says that fear of lawsuits has stopped companies from deploying these investments following the widely reported verdict against Air Canada in February 2024. But the dated polling for GMAC’s study wrapped up seven months before the criticisms published by Professor Cohan and other authorities like Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs’s head of stock research. That long lead time likely contributed to excessively optimistic survey insights and analyses about AI skills by GMAC in these results released during July.
Online MBA Grads Possess Better Technical Skills, Say Employers
Now, there’s a particular finding about online MBA training in this poll that’s especially interesting to our readers here at BSchools. This result concerns the recruiters’ appreciation for two specific categories of skills that business graduates gain in the online versions of both MBA and specialized business master’s degree programs.
GMAC points out that when compared to employers in other regions like Western Europe, United States recruiters have traditionally been those most skeptical of online degree programs within their responses to previous poll questionnaires. But in the 2024 survey’s results, GMAC says that American employers “are warming up to the idea that in-person degrees do not necessarily have a leg up on online programs when it comes to development of the above-mentioned skills.”
What skills? The Council’s pollsters asked the survey respondents about two specific skill categories.
First, GMAC asked employers to agree or disagree with this statement: “Employees with a graduate business degree from a fully in-person program are more likely to have strong technical skills than those with a degree from an online or predominantly online program.”
In the United States, more than half of the employers either disagreed with that statement or abstained. At a whopping 55 percent, that’s roughly a 62 percent increase over the global average of 34 percent of the employers who either disagreed or rendered no opinion.
It’s also about a 72 percent increase over the proportion of employers who disagreed or abstained from Europe. That’s a region where many online MBA and business master’s programs have been more popular than those in the U.S. for decades because of early initiatives by online education pioneers, such as Madrid’s respected IE Business School. In 2023, IE topped rankings published by both the Financial Times and the QS World University Rankings for the best online MBA programs.
Then GMAC asked employers to agree or disagree with a second statement: “Employees with a graduate business degree from a fully in-person program are more likely to have strong leadership and communication skills than those with a degree from an online or predominantly online program.”
In the United States, when compared with the tech respondents, a smaller but still substantial percentage of the employers either disagreed with or rendered no opinion about that statement: 36 percent.
Although less than the percentage of employers who commented about technical skills, that’s still roughly a 38 percent increase over the global average of 26 percent of the employers who either disagreed or abstained. It’s also about the same increase over the proportion of employers who disagreed or abstained from Europe, where, as we mentioned, many online MBA programs have achieved more popularity than those in America.
U.S. Job Outlook for Graduates of MBA Programs Outside America
Before closing, we note that there’s only one group of MBA graduates who can expect to face even worse job prospects during the rest of 2024 and 2025. Those are graduates of MBA programs based outside America who are looking for jobs within the United States. Typically these are non-U.S. citizens who require “additional legal documentation” to meet immigration requirements.
GMAC’s survey reports that this year, only 16 percent of American employers plan to hire MBAs who graduated from business schools outside the United States. In 2023, such international MBA graduates were hired by 40 percent of American companies. In other words, during a span of only one year, that’s a 60 percent plummet in the number of U.S. employers planning to hire international MBA grads.
About a third of the U.S. sample told GMAC they had “no plans” to offer jobs to MBA graduates from outside the United States, but might consider hiring them. And approximately half of the American MBA recruiters reported that they would not hire international candidates under any circumstances.
