I have a question from a reader who asks, “Should I include my failures in MBA Resume.”
Atul Jose (Admissions Consultant, F1GMAT): This is an important question and often an ignored aspect of your professional milestones. If you work in a high-risk industry or function – Finance, new Technology, or Research- the chance of failure is often high.
If you are a Finance candidate, your strategy might not have worked on an investment, there might be loopholes in a deal, the timing of your investment might be terrible, the asset class might be entirely new for your company, the due diligence process had a systemic weakness and other information gaps that can arise from the client/portfolio company/organization masking information from you.
If you are a Management Consultant, the insights you gained might be top-level without understanding the implementation challenges, or bottom-level, where the challenges might be just about implementation and tactical roadblocks that took your attention away from strategic milestones.
If you are Technologist, the client’s scope of the requirement might have expanded rapidly with the pressure from the market to adapt or evolve. Sometimes the integration challenges will add unplanned complexity, or a regulatory challenge might force you to redesign the solution.
If you are in Marketing, the access to Customer Data might have changed, or the permission around using or reusing customer data without consent might have changed in different regions.
The failure could be from complexity, lack of understanding of incentives, team dynamics, or regulation.
Often, these failures or learning can never be used as an entry in a 1-page MBA resume. But if you worked on a related or a similar project after the failure, you could incorporate the learning strategically in the resume.
Don’t use ‘failure’ or ‘learned’ in a 1-page MBA resume.
The resume is a snapshot of all your achievements and milestones. It should be a mix of what you did, under what condition you executed your responsibilities, and the IMPACT it had on your team, company, and industry.
There are opportunities to expand on the failures in the essays and recommendation letters. The tone of the narrative is where you must pay attention. Some schools are open to such examples, while many are not.
For help with Resume, Essay, and Recommendation letter Editing & Review, Subscribe to F1GMAT’s MBA Application Review Service
