5 Long-term Strategies for MBA Admissions Personal Branding (For less than 2-Yr Exp Candidates)

Applicants who had planned about positioning themselves as a distinct brand over 3-5 year pre-MBA time horizon tend to perform better than those who do 1-year pre-MBA image tweaking. By the time you are ready for MBA Application, there are two factors that you have no control: your reputation among Employers and the diversity of your experience. This article offers strategies for MBA aspirants with less than 2 years of experience. Here are some traits that you have to develop for your Personal Brand.

1) Uniqueness
 
We started our MBA Admission profile evaluation service and the most common group of applicants who come to our service is the Indian IT applicants. Most of them have 2-3 years of experience in one company with limited exposure outside their regular work. By not actively focusing on diversifying their experience or getting beyond the assigned work, these applicants have the lowest possibility of getting into a premier Business School. It is not their fault. Indians are the 2nd largest MBA application pool and majority of them are from IT background.

Uniqueness is not limited to nationality or pre-MBA work experience but also important in the manner in which you communicate with the AdCom, or even the phone operator. You might think that these are trivial issues and the interaction with the decision maker is enough but you would be surprised to learn how close the AdCom sits to the operator or how fast the story about rudeness pass in an AdCom's office.

Active planning is necessary. If you belong to a competitive applicant pool, list activities or experiences that would diversify your profile. Work might restrict you to one role but even in those roles, you can proactively contribute, and introduce systems and processes that benefit the group. It can turn into a great example for the essays. Beyond work, right after college, strategically select non-profit or volunteering that enhances your work diversity. Someone working in financial roles can complement that experience by taking up marketing for non-profits. Diversity of experience matters to Business Schools and for the Employers that they invite. Specialists are costly in any job market. Businesses need MBAs who can multitask, at least during initial years. They value candidates who are not limited by their pre-MBA experience.

2) Employability

You don’t have to work in known brands, but the responsibilities that you have taken will influence your employment. The competition is different after an MBA. You are competing with a selective group of MBAs who have passed sufficient hurdles during MBA application. The group is much more confident and diverse. The brand value of the MBA program or the Business School contributes 40% towards your profile but the remaining 60% is contributed by your skills and pre-MBA experience.

Some Employers would be willing to overlook your pre-MBA experience when the Business School is in the top 10 list. But if you happen to join a school in the top 50 list, it’s an even battle. You have to network and sell your employability. An employer might overlook uniqueness when the project in hand requires specific skills.

3) Managing diverse Personalities

The essence of Management is working with diverse personalities. You can develop certain skills during an MBA program, but it is unlikely that an introvert would turn into an extrovert with a 12-month or a 24-month MBA program. Your environment, family background, or events in early childhood have shaped who you are now. Although an MBA is an intense program that requires considerable adjustment, the biggest change happens, pre-MBA, when you start working on a regular basis. This adjustment dictates how you interact with people, prioritize your time, and understand power dynamics within a team.

Rather than limiting your interactions to a homogenous group: same friend circle, functional expertise or nationality, avail the opportunity to communicate with diverse working group including taking up the chance to travel and work with teams whose primary mode of communication is non-English. You will learn a lot from other cultures. Travel in itself would make you punctual and a better organizer. During this period, you develop the basic framework and etiquettes for a working life. Do not limit yourself thinking that an MBA would open up this opportunity.

4) Trustworthiness

Employers would rather prefer a candidate who is trustworthy than a know-it-all expert. The MBA AdCom follows this rule too. Since Business Schools act as an interface between the Employer and the untrained professional, the MBA essays are drafted to measure the applicant’s trustworthiness. If you have the courage to own up to your mistakes, AdCom will be willing to consider your profile first before the “self-congratulating” applicant. They know that this trait is rare. Skills can be developed and knowledge attained but owning responsibility for the team and individual tasks proves trustworthiness.

It is not just your story that the AdCom will buy. They will verify your trustworthiness with your recommenders. If you have not thought about the image that you are projecting with your Employers, it is time to rethink. You might convince your favorite supervisor to write a recommendation letter but he cannot fake the letter according to the story that you have developed. Recommendation letters are verifications and inconsistencies between essays and recommendation letters is a red herring.

5) Learning Skills

Another group of applicants that we had reviewed is the ones with low GPA. We are not talking about the inconsistencies of grades that arise when the GPA is converted from a 10 to 4 scale but grades or percentages that are poor in any scale. MBA is a graduate program with regular tests that require memorizing facts, and corroborating theories and ideas. Unless experiential learning takes over the entire curriculum, the fundamentals are still learned in a traditional way – lectures with regular tests and class assignments. Low grades show two things – the applicants do not have the ability or the interest to learn. Both reasons are detrimental for MBA admissions. The space available in essays to justify the poor grades would not be sufficient if the applicant has consistently faired below the class average.

If you have a 2.7+ GPA according to US grading scale, you have the necessary learning skills to excel in an intense MBA program. Open book tests makes up a large percentage of tests in MBA programs. If memory is to be blamed for the poor grades then compensate below 2.4 GPA with 720+ GMAT score