IE vs IESE MBA: Career Service, Ranking, Course Structure and Class Composition

Spain’s Economy has gone through five years of slowdown after the 2009 crisis that shrunk the GDP by 3.6%. However, for the past 3 years, Spain saw a revival of a sort. Unlike the US, the collapse was triggered by traditional banks. They overindulged in approving loans, anticipating a real-estate boom. When the reality did not match, the unemployment in Spain rose to 25% at one point, and the youth unemployment set a disastrous 50% levels. The bubble burst, but luckily Germany’s economy had offset the imbalance. Since the interest rates were set for the entire region (Euro), Spain couldn’t justify paying loans for a higher rate.

The government took painful austerity measures by reducing public sector wages, and hiking VAT rates from 18 to 21%. Luck had a big part too. Greece one of the popular tourist destinations lost their share of tourists to Spain due to inflation. The government's steps to broaden the tax revenue, first through a cut in personal (52 to 45%) and corporate (30 to 25%) taxes was a bigger contributing factor. Instead of regulations limiting enterprises, the government allowed companies to set up recruiting policies. The terms of employment offered the flexibility for companies to limit the working hours and in some cases, reduce the wages. Productivity improved. The GDP began to grow. Spain’s competitive export prices, resulting from low inflation, stabilized the economy.

In Spite of the economy, two Business Schools featured consistently in the top 25 MBA rankings in the world and IESE, in recent years, began ranking in the Top 10 Business School list. They have retained the top spot in all major ranking publications including The Economist, and the Financial Times. Let us look at the factors that make both these schools stand out and analyze some of the major differences.

1) Career Services Impact

MBA Aspirants might wonder how these schools maintain high post-MBA employment rate despite an economic crisis and high unemployment rate (2016 unemployment rate is 20%). The career service Centres at both the schools have worked hard to attract some of the best recruiters in the schools.

The IE Career Management Center (CMC) was instrumental in placing 41% of the 2015 Class with 32% finding opportunity in Europe. The number of students placed in Europe as a percentage of the class dropped by 20% from the 2011 levels; an indication that Europe as a post-MBA location has been slowly shrinking for International MBA students. The international mobility for the latest class was at 30%. This means that from 100 students from a region only 30 were able to change their post-MBA location, from their country of origin. North Americans and Asians fared the best for finding opportunities in Europe.

IESE MBA Career Service team was much more effective in placing a candidate with 65% of all the offers directly coming from the team and 3% from the IESE network. That is 27% more offers. However, compared to IE Business School (543), IESE has a much smaller class size (269).

2) Career Service Approach

IESE MBA Career Service is divided sector wise into Consulting, Financial Institutions, Venture Capital and Private Equity, Consumer Goods, Retail and Luxury, Healthcare, High-Tech, Media and Telecom, General Industry, and Energy, Utilities and Commodities. The employer is assigned to a Key Accounts Manager in each sector, and the requirement for each job profile is evaluated, and the recommendations offered to find the appropriate candidate.

IE Business School has a different approach. CMC works closely with recruiters and understands the skills and characteristics that they are looking in a candidate. The Career service team then works with the Student Clubs to streamline the process of finding the appropriate candidate for each position. Ranking

3) Ranking

Although ranking cannot be taken on its face value without understanding the methodology behind the number crunching, it still gives us an overview of some of the best MBA programs in the world.



The Economist MBA ranking has been the most disruptive of the three popular rankings, over the past couple of years. IE Business School dropped the most in the ranking. In Financial Times and BusinessWeek ranking, the difference between the two MBA programs is only by 1 and 2 positions respectively. However when we averaged the ranking, IESE is ahead of IE Business School by 2 positions.
 
4) Course Structure

IE offers a 13 Month International MBA Program, which can be customized according to Formats (Face-to-Face and online), language of Study (Spanish or English) and areas of specialization (Functional Areas - Corporate Finance, Marketing & Sales, Information Technology or Industries - Digital Marketing, Tourism Management, Sports Management and Biotechnology Management)

IESE offers an 19 Month MBA Program that can be customized according to student’s post-MBA goals – Entrepreneurship, Individual contributor, or leadership roles.  The program builds the foundation with General Management, puts emphasis on Leadership & Ethics, gives an International perspective and teaches Entrepreneurial students about starting and growing a Business.

5) Class Composition

The majority of the class in IE Business School comes from Engineering (28%) and Business (33%) backgrounds. IESE also has a similar class composition with 40% from Business and 36% from Engineering background. The majority of the MBA Class at IE Business School is comprised of students from Spain, Latin America, and other European Countries, followed by students from North America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.  IESE MBA Students are represented by European students (45%), followed by Asia (23%) and near equal number from North and Latin America: 14% and 12% respectively.

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Read the Second Part of the Series - IESE vs IE MBA Program - Which is Better?