Unconventional Ways to Use an MBA Degree
If your idea of an MBA graduate is limited to someone who works on Wall Street or for a major corporation, you need to update your viewpoint. More and more MBAs are going elsewhere to find employment, and to some surprising places.
Tim Elliott, for example, who used to work as vice president of finance and technology for a U.S. skin-care company, is now employed at the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a non-profit organization. His job is to find investors for businesses in Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Kenya. "I started wondering if making rich people richer was really my mission in life," Elliott told Businessweek. "It was a bit of a risky career change, but it's worked out quite well."
Today's MBA programs help prepare graduates for more than just work for investment firms, consultancies and the corporate world; they now offer classes in philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, global development, ethics and board governance, according to The Princeton Review.
Working for non profits isn't the only alternative career path some MBAs choose. More and more are being hired by the U.S. government, according to The Princeton Review, including the Department of Commerce, the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Labor Department and even the Central Intelligence Agency.
And one does not have to be completely altruistic to find a job that helps others. Daniel Hsu, for example, who has an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, is working for a Chinese start-up that makes products for customers in developing countries who don't have electricity. "The downturn made it very easy to remember my original priorities and stay on a more direct path towards a personally fulfilling career," Hsu told MITSloan.mit.edu.
