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

by Laurie Pickard

  I found my own foray into learning communities richly rewarding. After two years of solo coursework, I yearned to connect with other learners in a more lasting way. In March 2015, I placed a tiny button on my website that said, “I’m forming a learning community. Will you join me?” Within a few days, fifty people had registered their email addresses and filled out a short application form. By July, the No-Pay MBA Network was up and running. I facilitated that learning group for nearly two years, during which time I organized mock negotiation exercises, planned courses for members to take together, brought in guest speakers, and introduced a lot of members to each other. Most rewarding, perhaps, was what I learned from the members of the group as they shared their ambitions, their goals, and their expertise.

  The members of the community also benefited immensely from the shared experience. Kristof and Hillary, whose stories you read earlier in this book, met as two of the inaugural members of the No-Pay MBA Network. As Hillary says, “Members of the No-Pay MBA Network have become some of my closest friends and most trusted professional advisers/partners. I’ve also been able to co-create a mutually supportive mastermind group with some members as we all progress into similar career plans.” Hillary has built an expansive network through her studies, not only in the No-Pay MBA Network but also in her volunteer work as a Course Catalyst mentor for several courses produced by +Acumen on the NovoEd platform. This opportunity arose when the course facilitators noticed Hillary’s high level of engagement and mastery of the material. She has since gone on to join a more elite group of learning advocates, the +Acumen Corps, with an offer to serve as the Lead Editor of +Acumen’s Yearbook. That role ties in nicely with Hillary’s professional life as a publisher.

  TIPS FOR FORMING AND FACILITATING A LEARNING GROUP

  Start with a course on the NovoEd platform that requires group work. For example, Technology Entrepreneurship asks you to use teamwork to identify ideal customers, determine their problems, and propose solutions.

  Set requirements for participation. You want to attract highly motivated and hardworking people who are very likely to complete the course in its entirety (those who have completed a MOOC before, have taken more than one course on the same topic, have signed up for a multicourse series, have paid for a verified certificate, etc.).

  Pay attention to time zone, and determine a group meeting time convenient to all participants. This can be tricky for international groups with students in the United States, China, and Timbuktu. Try out a scheduling app, such as Google Calendar or World Time Buddy.

  Take advantage of free project management tools such as Google Drive, Trello, and Google Hangouts. With Google Drive’s file-sharing software, for example, you can create a group folder that everyone can easily access.

  Set goals for the group. Make these goals achievable, specific, and time-sensitive. For example, the group might set its sights on finishing all the requirements of a certain course, meeting a predetermined number of times, and/or creating a joint report or presentation, all within a specific time frame.

  Clarify the roles and responsibilities of each individual participant. Consider appointing individuals to specific tasks, such as scheduling and facilitating meetings, gauging participation, or, in the case of a final project, drafting various portions of the summary report.

  Find members through multiple channels, including the course discussion forum, MOOCLab.club, the No-Pay MBA Facebook group, LinkedIn, and others.

  Go easy on yourself. Facilitating a learning group can pose a lot of challenges, especially with members scattered across the globe and busy with a multitude of commitments. Use what you learn from your first experience to improve your next one.

  As with all of the relationships in your life, you must consistently invest time building and nurturing the ones you form with other online learners. A one-minute investment in a “Hey, how are you doing?” email will keep the connection alive.

  Create Your One-Hour-Per-Week Networking Plan

  Chris Haroun, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose background includes working at such big-name finance and management consulting firms as Goldman Sachs, Citadel, and Accenture, frequently serves as a guest lecturer at Bay Area business schools, including Berkeley and Stanford. He also created one of the most popular business courses on the Udemy platform, An Entire MBA in One Course. In his live university classes Haroun often polls his students at the beginning of the semester, asking, “What if, for the next twenty weeks, you could do something that takes just one hour per week, and guarantee that you would get the job of your dreams? Raise your hand if you would do that thing.” Inevitably, every hand shoots up. Who wouldn’t spend just an hour per week during a single semester to land their dream job? And yet, most students get so caught up in class projects, assignments, and social obligations that they never spend a mere hour each week to move toward their career goal. Haroun’s One-Hour-Per-Week Plan costs nothing to implement. You just invest one hour per week for twenty weeks conducting informational interviews (a form of networking—see Figure 6-2) and talking to individuals who not only provide information but turn into professional connections.

  In An Entire MBA in One Course, Haroun tells students that anyone can replicate a valuable business school network by devoting one hour per week to making strategic use of networking platforms such as LinkedIn. Once again, social media meets six degrees of separation.

  Figure 6-2

  ADVISER’S CHALLENGE

  INTERVIEW YOUR WAY TO A WORLD-CLASS NETWORK

  Review your hypotheses from Chapter 5 regarding industry, company, and role. People who work in your target industries, companies, and roles can add both information and connections to your business education.

  Make a list of six people you want to interview. If you implement the six degrees of separation principle, you can put anyone, no matter how high up in an organization, on your target list. However, keep in mind that the top dog can seldom provide as much insight and help as much as the pack you run with. If possible, start with people you already know or have met. Use LinkedIn to identify other people in your “friend of a friend” network who work in your target companies, industries, or roles.

  Compose a short message you can deliver to each person on your list, asking for an interview. People will respond best to a single paragraph request that clearly states your reason for contacting them and asks for a brief conversation (thirty minutes at most) by phone, on social media, or in person. You want to make it easy for people to say yes. Always use the name of the person who recommended this connection. If you are making a cold call, LinkedIn can come to the rescue by allowing your target connection to learn about you before agreeing to a chat.

  Research your target. A well-prepared interviewer gets the best results. Find out as much as you can about the person you want to interview. People respond more warmly to interviewers who have done their homework. You may want to prepare a few questions so that you feel comfortable kicking off the conversation.

  Allow the conversation to flow naturally. If you have prepared a set of questions you want to ask, don’t let that list derail an interesting conversation. Also, keep an eye on the clock, and make sure you respect the interviewee’s busy schedule.

  Share your resume. You can use all the feedback you can get to the way you present your nontraditional business education. DO NOT ask if the target’s company is hiring or say that you are looking for a job, but DO ask how that person ended up in their current role. People like to talk about their own careers, especially the surprising ways they landed where they did.

  Ask for an introduction to another person. Most people will give you names of people they like and admire or think can help you fill in your knowledge about their business.

  Say thank you. People enjoy receiving a thank-you note for their time and generosity. Mention something personal you learned about the person. That will help cement a more lasting bond.

  Informational interviewing expands yo
ur network, of course, but it also sets you up to return favors later in your career. Brian interviewed Julianne when he was researching jobs in entertainment production. That led him to Josh, who eventually hired Brian as an intern on a production crew for a network evening news program. Several years later, after Brian moved into a senior production role at the network, he got a call from Julianne, saying she had taken time off to raise her family and hoped Brian could introduce her to Josh. Networking works both ways.

  Follow the Five Principles of Networking

  Networking is part art, part science. While some people naturally make friends wherever they go and find it easy to ask for and grant favors, others of us must work at it. If you fall into the latter camp, as so many of us do, these five basic principles might make you more comfortable forging the connections you need:

  1.Offer help and support. It’s easy to forget the power of this variation of the Golden Rule. People help those who help them. When Arjan started his Beyond Silicon Valley study group, he didn’t do it with purely selfish motives; he truly wanted to serve his community. If networking seems contrived or phony to you, try reframing the process by asking, “How might I help the people I want to meet?” As much as you need them, they need you. For more on this principle, take a look at Adam Grant’s Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.

  2.Make networking a regular practice. We talked about the One-Hour-Per-Week Plan. At least a couple of times each week, do something (no matter how small) to grow or deepen your network, whether writing a note to a former classmate, sending an email to someone you’d like to meet, or adding information to your LinkedIn profile. In addition, keep jotting down new ideas for expanding your network. Don’t restrict this practice to the early stages of your career; make it a lifetime habit.

  3.Play the long game. Maintain a rich range of connections. As we saw with Brian and Julianne, you never know when a person higher up the ladder will become a peer or even a subordinate. Network at all levels and across a broad spectrum, even with people in far different industries, companies, and roles. Over the span of your work life, you may go from banker to baker to candlestick maker (and back again).

  4.Keep it real. The Internet can feel like a cold and impersonal place, but you can pump life into it by treating your virtual interactions as you would those in your real life. Let your humanity rule your chats and conversations. It’s another variation of the Golden Rule: Treat others as human beings, and they will return the favor. My network includes many people I have never met face-to-face, but who have nonetheless become trusted advisers, collaborators, and friends. When someone’s work inspires you, reach out to let him or her know your feelings. Sure, you might not hear back, but you might end up making someone’s day and forging a new connection to boot.

  5.Make honesty your number-one priority. Honesty really is the best policy. All too often, folks create false online personae in an attempt to mask flaws and shortcomings or to disguise the fact that they are newbies with an incomplete business education or little experience in the workplace. This only builds a false impression that sooner or later will bite you in an uncomfortable place. We’ve talked about first impressions. If it turns out that you have built yours on quicksand, it will end up doing more harm than good.

  Michael Salmon, author of the book Supernetworking: Reach the Right People, Build Your Career Network, and Land Your Dream Job, practices what he preaches. His company, Salmon & Associates, specializes in consulting to financial advisers in major financial institutions. Clients and competitors consider him one of the foremost trainers and coaches in the field, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took years of assiduous networking that began when he confided his ambition to get into the financial services industry with a second cousin who happened to work at Merrill Lynch. The cousin introduced Michael to his boss, upon whom Michael made such a favorable impression that she scheduled time for him to meet with her and two regional sales managers. That meeting led to several assignments with Merrill Lynch and opened doors to doing business with Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, Bank of America, UBS, Wells Fargo, SunTrust, Credit Suisse, and others.

  Was it a stroke of luck that launched Michael’s successful career? Not by a long shot. “I figured out how to access the right people in those organizations and convince them that our programs would help them get better results,” he says. “I now run exactly the sort of business I always wanted: I make good money, I love what I do, I’m happy 365 days a year, and because I give back as much as I get from others, I enjoy the rewards of unusually good karma. And it all started with that first conversation with a second cousin.”

  POINTS TO REMEMBER

  1.Think strategically when you build your network of professional contacts; include a wide range of connections, from fellow business students to potential employers or investors.

  2.Craft an honest online business persona that will make a great first impression on everyone who sees it.

  3.Create and/or join supportive learning communities.

  4.Use informational interviews to expand both your knowledge and your network of professional contacts.

  5.Make networking a lifelong habit.

  7

  Deepen Your Expertise

  Establishing Your Professional Credibility

  MARK gives himself a high-five as he leaves the meeting. He has just nailed a presentation to a group of senior managers at MedSync, the Fortune 500 medical technology company where he works. An accomplished engineer, Mark has always loved tinkering with devices and coming up with ideas that will make them more efficient. When he was promoted into a management role, heading a small team of engineers, he quickly realized that he needed to learn a lot more about the business side of his industry. A more efficient device would not make it to market unless it made bottom-line sense, and it wouldn’t succeed unless customers fell in love with it. Thankfully, a MOOC-based business education, capped off by a set of data science courses, came to his rescue.

  When Mark first dove into the world of online business education, he was looking for broad-based business knowledge that could bolster his career. He didn’t expect to find data analysis so fascinating. Had he enrolled in a traditional MBA program, he might not even have stumbled onto the topic at all, because many MBA programs do not require their students to take it. However, the choose-your-own curriculum he had devised for himself led him to the Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins (on Coursera), a set of courses that included everything from a basic introduction to advanced techniques. Before long, Mark began looking at everything related to his work through the lens of data analysis, and everywhere he looked he saw opportunities for MedSync to use data to capture a competitive edge. When his personal list of data science projects grew longer than a page, he took a risk and invited his boss and a few other senior managers to a short meeting on a Friday afternoon. During a carefully orchestrated thirty-minute pitch, he built the business case for tackling three projects that would take advantage of data the company was already gathering. The result? The top brass asked Mark to lead a new product development initiative, using data on customer preferences to design profitable new products.

  Many MBA programs offer students the opportunity to specialize by selecting an MBA concentration. As with a college major, a concentration builds deep expertise in a narrow realm of the business curriculum. To replicate this online, you will need to take several courses on the same topic, progressing through more difficult and advanced material. To advance your career, you must become an expert in something, and to become an expert you need to dive deeply into a particular area of business that can fuel your success. What area of expertise do you want to deepen?

  Choose Your MBA Concentration

  By now, you’ve studied the basics, developed fluency in the language of business, and practiced the basic business competencies. In addition to your coursework, you’ve also taken stock of your aptitudes, thought deeply about the kind of work you enjoy
, developed a set of hypotheses about Career-Self Fit, conducted some informational interviews, and begun to build your network of professional contacts. Now it’s time to develop your expertise in a narrower field of study, one that flows naturally from everything you’ve learned so far.

  Before you commit, however, survey the MOOC platforms to look for sets of courses in your prospective concentration. Do you see multiple courses on your topic? Coursera’s multicourse Specializations fit the bill; likewise edX offers a set of MicroMasters programs. Even if the MOOC platforms haven’t packaged a set of courses for you, you still want to find at least four to six more advanced courses related to your concentration. Fewer may indicate too narrow a focus. In Mark’s area of concentration, for example, Coursera offers dozens of courses on data analysis, from the University of California’s Data Visualization with Tableau to the University of Illinois’s Exploring and Producing Data for Business Decision Making and Duke University’s Master Data Analysis in Excel.

  If you find few courses on your topic, you may need to exercise a little flexibility. Some years ago, one of my fellow MOOC business students reached out to ask for advice on how to structure a concentration in hospital administration. However, she could find very few courses on that specific topic, and most of them were introductory. I advised her to take a more flexible approach to gaining the expertise she needed, perhaps specializing in supply chain management or organizational development and seeking courses on management that seemed especially well-suited to the medical field, perhaps even supplementing her online education with a few carefully chosen in-person workshops or short courses.