Management Program:Influence on Career Levels

When you look at the jobs with the most satisfaction or meaning – Clergy or religious head features in the top followed by Surgeons, Teachers/Education Administrators, and interestingly Chiropractors while Cooks in Fast Food restaurants, Fashion Designers and Host/Hostesses in Restaurants feature at the bottom.

Alumni from Graduate Management programs features somewhere in the middle. Although they can’t compete with Surgeons on the median salary ($299,600) or job meaning (94%), the progression in the career from Entry Level to C-Level executives increases their job satisfaction. The closest these Alumni have reached on job satisfaction with Surgeons is at executive or C-Level with 93% of them reporting satisfaction with their job profile. The work, although challenging, becomes more meaningful at the executive level. Not far from the well-defined career structure is the self-employed graduate program alumni, who report 90% satisfaction with their current responsibilities.

Job Satisfaction – By Career Level (Graduate Management Program)



How much do they value the Graduate Management Program?




It is interesting to see how with each career level, the alumni starts appreciating the value of the program over other career success factors: Hard work, Networking, Attitude towards life, Innate Ability, Other Education and Good Luck. Alumni at all career levels cited Hard work as the primary influencer in their career progression. Those who are in the entry or mid-level valued networking over their graduate program, but as they entered Senior to C-Suite levels, they began to understand the value of the Graduate Management program with majority of them citing the program as the 2nd biggest factor in their career success till date.
 
Career Level Age Split Up and Working Hours Per Week

If you were assuming that with a team handling part of your responsibilities, each step up the career ladder, need fewer working hours, you would be wrong. With each step, the working hours will increase, reaching a peak of 53 hours for a C-Suite. The numbers might seem way under calculated for entry level alumni with just  45 hours a week or 9 hours per day, but remember that these surveys don’t take into consideration, the unofficial time that professionals spend on their work every day during commute or while working from home after the defined office hours.

 

 



When you look at the median salary, the salary does not double or triple after reaching mid-level career positions, instead they move up at 15 to 25% with the C-Suite position fetching a 50 to 100% hike.
According to Vivek Wadhwa, a Tech Entrepreneur and Academic at the Kauffman Foundation, the average age of start-up founders who has some degree of success is 40. When you combine the average age, the average working hours, the median salary, and the average age of a successful start-up Founder, 40 seems to make sense as it is the time, salary stagnates, and it is the time when professionals have gained enough experience to leverage their network.

Reference: F1GMAT's MBA Research Guide
GMAC Graduate Management Program Survey 2015