Don't Pay for Your MBA: The Faster, Cheaper, Better Way to Get the Business Education You Need

by Laurie Pickard

  Your process of self-discovery, coupled with your exposure to new business ideas, can yield some unexpected results. Roland, a human resources manager, grew fascinated with design thinking, entrepreneurship, and product development. Before starting his MOOC-based business studies, he would never have predicted that these subjects would strike his fancy. He had felt far more attracted to operations management, business process improvement, and leadership. But his self-assessment confirmed his aptitude for out-of-the-box thinking, and his Meyer-Briggs personality test revealed him as a creative, empathetic, and sensitive individual. His business career inventory suggested that he would find a good match in any job involving a high degree of personal interaction and problem solving, possibly in marketing, new product development, or entrepreneurship. On the other hand, Roland knew himself well enough to know that any position must also offer the stability and predictability he craved. He wasn’t at all interested in ditching his secure job to join a Silicon Valley startup, nor was he the type to spend his evenings tinkering in the garage or taking a second mortgage to finance a startup business. When the workday was done, he just wanted to relax at home over a nice meal and a glass of wine.

  His introspection did, however, lead him to shift his thinking about his career. Of all his work experiences, he had felt most passionate about the time he had spent revamping the onboarding process for new hires in order to make their first days in the office more fun and interactive. “What if I went to my boss with a detailed plan to create a customer-oriented hiring process?” he thought. This project would tap into his predilection for entrepreneurship and design thinking without risking the safety of working in a big company. While the assessment he completed may have pegged him as an entrepreneur, it took Roland’s own insight to recognize “intrapreneurship” as the ideal fit. Through the combination of business classes, self-assessment, and reflection, Roland has found great satisfaction at work.

  Develop Your Hypotheses

  When Eric Reis wrote The Lean Startup, he launched a cataclysmic shift in thinking about entrepreneurship. Rather than emphasize detailed and rigid business plans, Reis championed an experimental approach to launching a new enterprise. Like a good scientist, an entrepreneur should develop hypotheses (in this case, ideas about which new products customers will buy) that can be tested on a small scale before making a big investment. Implementing a detailed business plan can cost a small (or not-so-small) fortune, compared to testing a Minimum Viable Product with a targeted group of customers.1 The latter affords entrepreneurs a relatively inexpensive way to learn what works and doesn’t work with the target market.

  This same philosophy underpins the concept of Design Thinking, a topic you may want to add to your self-guided curriculum. As Professor Jeanne Liedtka of the University of Virginia explains in the popular MOOC on the subject, Design Thinking for Innovation, the smart designer never goes “all-in” with a single big idea but rather places many small bets with far less risk.2 Instead of retooling the whole factory to build a new bicycle without knowing whether customers will fall in love with it, you can build a prototype that customers can test-drive and evaluate. With user input, you can decide whether to implement or adjust your plans.

  As you craft your education and your career path, you can think of yourself as both an entrepreneur and a designer. You may not have embarked on your MOOC-based business education with the principles of Lean Startup and Design Thinking in mind, but your education already embodies important elements of both concepts. Instead of taking out a gigantic loan, quitting your job, and investing two years to advance your career with a big expensive degree, you have placed a small bet on an educational path that will allow you to shift course as you gather new information. Going forward you can use both approaches to tailor your education and shape your career trajectory. Even if your career plan starts as a hunch, as it did for both Cory and me, you can greatly benefit from testing a hunch. Write it down, mull it over, test-drive it, adjust it, and try it again.

  Your experimentation with various hypotheses will help you discover what I call Career-Self Fit, the ideal convergence of your unique talents, work style, and life goals with a job and a career. To generate useful hypotheses, you must assemble all available evidence, just the way a scientist does. For career purposes, the evidence includes past work experiences, insights obtained from business courses, and a careful self-assessment. With your own evidence in hand, try filling out the Industry/Company/Role Finder. To show you how to do it, I’ve added notes drawn from my own evidence in Figure 5-2.

  Figure 5-2. Industry/Company/Role Finder

  As you know from reading the introduction to this book, I have always loved to travel, learn new languages, and immerse myself in foreign cultures. That naturally led me to the world of international development. You also know about my passion for online education, which made me think about working in the field of education, more specifically the MOOCs, where education and technology intersect. My own online business education convinced me that I would find the greatest fulfillment in an entrepreneurial and/or managerial role. Initially, my Industry/Company/Role Finder contained three hypotheses; yours might range from two to six. Settling for only one indicates too much inflexibility with respect to possible career options. More than six suggests you should more narrowly focus your thought experiments.

  In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Steve Jobs described building a career as “connecting the dots.”3 What dots have you already connected? What dots do you see in your future? Think creatively about your dots, looking for some unconventional, possibly surprising ones. Jobs went on to explain how an early interest in calligraphy translated into an appreciation for beautiful fonts that became important later in his career, especially when designing the first Macintosh computer. The New York University Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service recommends a similar visioning process it calls the Tracks Exercise. This exercise advises students to think of their future careers in terms of a set of jobs that appeal to them and the career “tracks” (courses, assignments, internships, and jobs experiences) that can help them arrive in one of those positions.4

  Let your mind soar. Remain playful, imaginative, freewheeling as you consider your future prospects. Remember, you are not committing to any one industry/company/role; you’re just test-driving ideas that might land you in the best possible Career-Self Fit. Even if you currently work in an industry you love and for a company that treats you well, you may want to make a major career shift at some point in your life. You should keep formulating and testing hypotheses throughout your life, even if you keep coming back to the same Career-Self Fit. Throughout this book I have emphasized three results you might get from your self-administered MBA equivalent: a) landing a dream job, b) climbing the ladder at your current employer, and c) starting your own business. Who knows, you may go from A to B to C or even from C back to A. Testing hypotheses will help you make those transitions.

  Test Your Hypotheses

  Take a moment to review the Mastery Pyramid from Chapter 3. Your progression through the various levels of the pyramid should bring you ever closer to your Career-Self Fit. At the first two levels you explore the full business landscape, taking it all in, absorbing information from a variety of business disciplines, and getting a feel for what practitioners of those disciplines actually do at work. At this point you are not committing to a particular industry/company/role. You are just gathering the information you will need to make the transition from general business skills at the second level to the specific, industry-related skills at the third level.

  Gradually, you will sign up for courses that resonate with your growing interest in a particular discipline. Once you reach that third level, you should test your various hypotheses with every MOOC you take. If Introduction to Marketing turned you on, you will most likely enroll in Advanced Marketing, Digital Marketing, and Brand Management. The material will become increasingly valuable to you as you prog
ress toward implementing your new knowledge and skills. You can further test your assumptions about a certain industry/company/role with research, reading, internships, short-term consultancies, informational interviews, company visits, and business networking. During this final phase you are refining, improving, and, in some cases, rejecting one or more of your hypotheses. You may still be filling in a few gaps in your knowledge and skill set, but you are drawing closer to at least a preliminary career commitment, be that advancement at your current employer, a new job, or an entrepreneurial adventure.

  Figure 5-3. The Mastery Pyramid and Your Career

  The next two chapters, on building your business network and applying your skills in the real world, will afford you an opportunity to test your hypotheses even further. Prepare yourself for some obstacles and surprises along the way. While freelancing market research for a pharmaceutical company, you might discover that full-time employment there will require intensive training in data analysis, a prospect that may either excite you or lead you to consider other options. Or an internship with a business law professor at a traditional business school might make you think twice about pursuing a career in that field because it ends up boring you to tears.

  However you choose to test your hypotheses, you want to do it both from a worm’s-eye view (boots on the ground, doing real work in a real job in the real world) and from a satellite’s-eye view (above the fray, peering down at the whole landscape of options). Before you make a long-term commitment to a certain industry/company/role, you should test it in the short term and vice versa. Success in life and work almost always involves seeing both the little and the big picture. Little picture: “Do I really enjoy the work I’m doing, or am I fooling myself into thinking it will somehow become more thrilling down the line?” Big picture: “Does the work I love offer opportunities for growth, or will disruptive technology make it obsolete in five years?”

  Take a Worm’s-Eye View

  When you test your hypotheses from a worm’s-eye view, you gather information from the real world. What does it actually feel like when you do the work you have targeted as a good career option? While coursework can yield important insights, especially when it involves case studies and real-world examples, spending time in a real workplace and talking to people who work or have worked in the industries/companies/roles on your list will give you a better idea about what really goes on day in and day out. What does the work look like when you finally put your boots on the ground?

  Of all the methods you might choose, internships and volunteer work yield the greatest results. The more closely the internship or volunteer project resembles the exact industry/company/role you are researching, the more you will learn from the experience. For example, if you are curious about a role as a management consultant, any experience in that world will tell you a lot. Perhaps you can offer your services pro bono to a small startup, a local nonprofit, or your uncle’s coffee shop. If you have set your sights on management consulting with one of the Big Three (McKinsey, Bain & Company, The Boston Consulting Group), an internship at one of those firms will give you the boots-on-the-ground experience you need in order to understand what it would feel like working there full-time. (If nothing is available at one of the Big Three, an internship at a second-tier firm can provide similar experience.) No matter what sort of work you imagine doing, actually doing it can be a very different kettle of fish.

  Jerome, the instructional designer you met in Chapter 4, knows exactly how to take the worm’s-eye view. Not only does he fully immerse himself in his coursework and find ways to practice what he’s learning, he also takes his new skills outside the classroom. While Jerome loves the work he does for the software company where he currently works, he has been testing the idea that he might really like to get into educational administration. To better understand what a management role at an education company might feel like, he recently began volunteering at an online education startup. Drawing on what he learned in Financial Modeling for the Social Sector, he eagerly got involved in a project where he could develop a financial model for forecasting operating expenses and setting prices on products. Not only did his work contribute to the goals of the organization, it also added to his boots-on-the-ground research into his ideal Career-Self Fit. By sitting in on the management meetings where people discussed and debated the organization’s finances, Jerome realized that he much preferred designing software to debating pricing strategy. On the other hand, he has loved strategizing about company culture and staff development. These insights have helped Jerome refine his thinking about what his next career step will be.

  Take a Satellite’s-Eye View

  Just as getting into the trenches and gathering real-world experience can help shape your future career, so can stepping back and contemplating your preferred industry/company/role from a more general perspective. Try to look five years, ten years, or even further into the future, imagining your work future at various points along the way. Again, think in terms of industry/company/role:

  1.Industry. Where will this industry be in five, ten, and twenty-five years? In 2015, McKinsey & Company predicted that the industries poised for greatest long-term growth were automotive, agriculture, food processing, retail, and healthcare.5 Business Insider identified general and operations managers, software applications development, computer system analysts, accountants and auditors, management analysts, computer and information systems managers, first-line supervisors of office and administrative workers, and personal financial consultants among the top-ten “best jobs of the future.”6 Don’t pick a career based solely on its projected future, but do take into account that such fields as healthcare, management, and technology offer tremendous career opportunities.

  2.Company. Is your current company (or the one you aspire to join) well managed, profitable, poised for growth? Do you see it prospering far into the future? If you are striving for advancement with your current employer, study the company from an investor’s point of view. Would you put your own money into the operation, hoping for a return on your investment? If you are planning to start your own company, do you see yourself running the business in the long term, or do you envision selling it within a few years so that you can move on to the next entrepreneurial adventure?

  3.Role. What progress could you make over the years starting from your current position? What position above the next one would you like to win? Do you get excited about the work done by senior people in your industry or company? What would you like to be doing at the peak of your career?

  Louisa, the musician you met in Chapter 3, offers an instructive example of taking both a worm’s-eye and a satellite’s-eye view of her career. Trained as a classical musician, she might have followed the well-traveled path to the concert stage, but she ended up in an entirely different world, working in product and customer strategy at a tech startup. It happened because she thought long and hard about her long-term future. Yes, she had always yearned to perform before appreciative audiences, but she knew the odds of that still happening fifteen years from now were slim to none. She was a gifted musical performer, but also had a knack for listening, an innate curiosity, and an abiding interest in entrepreneurship. Deciding to shift course away from musicianship, she saw marketing as a possible Career Self-Fit. Would marketing give her a chance to apply her nonmusical talents? To answer that question, she began flexing her marketing muscles in the field of classical music. Having cofounded a nonprofit arts organization while studying clarinet in graduate school, she had actually done a good deal of marketing and public relations in her quest to grow the organization. During that time, she had also landed a seasonal gig doing marketing and PR for the Cincinnati Opera. These experiences led her to a position with a marketing agency, where she worked as a consultant to a large and well-known consumer-goods firm.

  With these experiences under her belt, Louisa contemplated her next move. Marketing seemed like a pretty good fit, but spending her entire career working for a
huge corporation did not appeal to her at all. She wanted an environment more like a jazz quintet than a symphony orchestra. What about a small firm, or even a startup, especially one that somehow involved music? She wasn’t even sure if such a company existed, but some careful research led her to LISNR, a startup that had developed a data transmission technology using sound waves. It wasn’t exactly music, but it was close enough to pique her interest.

  During the interview for a job as an account manager at LISNR, Louisa drew on her ability to visualize how sound travels, a skill she had honed at conservatory but never expected to use in a business setting. The interview panel loved her deep knowledge of acoustics and sound technology. Given her stint in marketing, they quickly agreed that she was by far the best candidate for the position. The moral of the story? Louisa imagined her life far into the future, but she didn’t just dream about her future, she put her boots on the ground, testing her developing hypotheses with real work experiences. Has she found her life’s true calling? Maybe, maybe not. Her continuing MOOC education may take her down many more surprising paths.

  POINTS TO REMEMBER