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

by Laurie Pickard

  Think of your portfolio as a novel. You, the main character, progress through many adventures. A good novel highlights those adventures in a way that attracts and holds a reader’s interest. Most readers would put down a novel that detailed everything you’ve ever done in chronological order: “I was born on August 16, 1988, then I went to kindergarten, then I ate lunch, then I went to bed, then I got up and went to high school, then I blah, blah, blah. . . .” Like an engrossing novel, your portfolio should highlight only the most interesting and compelling details, those that advance the plot toward a satisfying conclusion: a promotion, a new job, or a business startup. Do not confuse a portfolio with a resume. A resume merely serves as jacket-flap copy for your novel. In Chapter 8, we’ll look closely at how you can most effectively incorporate your self-directed business education into your resume.

  Figure 7-2

  ADVISER’S CHALLENGE

  BUILD YOUR DIGITAL PORTFOLIO

  Craft your key message. While it is tempting when creating a portfolio to start by choosing which portfolio platform you will use and then uploading materials, I suggest you start instead by thinking about what message you would like your portfolio to convey. You could even think of your key message as a mission statement, a single sentence that summarizes where you have arrived as a result of your business education and where you want it to take you next. For example, Mark might state his mission this way: “I am an accomplished data analysis professional seeking to apply my skills in the marketing department of a major corporation.” This mission statement doesn’t need to be written anywhere in your portfolio, but it will guide the selection and organization of elements you include in it.

  Assemble the elements. You want to display the best examples of your work to date. Identify tangible work products that you have produced, either on-the-job, during internships, or as a result of your Culmination Project. These might include written reports, blog posts or articles written by or about you, video presentations, slide decks, your website, or anything else that you can deliver to your target audience electronically or in-person. Make sure your examples tie closely to your mission statement, emphasizing your specific skills and your application of those skills. For example, Mark would not put a video of the ham radio he built in high school in a portfolio aimed at landing a job in data analysis.

  Get permission to share elements owned by someone else. As a rule, any work product created for an employer belongs to that organization, and you must get their written permission to use it in your portfolio. Companies fiercely protect their intellectual property and often require employees to sign nondisclosure agreements. If you cannot obtain written permission to share a work product, ask your employer for testimonials from management about the quality of that work. For example, while Mark did not even try to persuade his boss to let him share his presentation to management, he did get him to write a half-page testimonial about the fact that Mark’s presentation eventually led to the development of many new products for MedSync.

  Choose a display location. You can enable access to your portfolio many different ways. Of course, you can print it up just as an artist would do, but in this age of digital communication, you should probably build your portfolio online. In a pinch, someone with few web creation skills can use simple tools such as WordPress, SquareSpace, and Google Sites. LinkedIn, About.me, and Strikingly.com also offer excellent options. Portfolium, Pathbrite, and Foliotek provide a good alternative for academic portfolios, but you might consider using the portfolio feature on NoPayMBA.com, designed specifically for MOOC business students. Mark not only built his own website with links to his major work products, he maintained a constant presence on LinkedIn and created a portfolio on NoPayMBA.com (with links to the projects on his personal site).

  Make it attractive. You may not be the world’s greatest artist, but that should not stop you from making your portfolio look visually appealing. Avoid large blocks of text in favor of easily digestible images and short bullets that will keep your reader from falling asleep while browsing your portfolio. Use images to convey your message more powerfully. For example, Mark might have relied on his friend Greg, a graphic designer, to help him create an informative graphic that captured the essence of his presentation to management.

  Get feedback. Once you have made your portfolio as complete and well organized as possible, share it with folks in your network. Try to include someone with a background in graphics, a writer, a peer, a mentor, a professor, and anyone else who can give you an honest opinion from a professional perspective. Welcome feedback, even if you disagree with it.

  Continue to grow your portfolio. Keep updating your portfolio, adding new items, deleting ones that have become irrelevant, and rebuilding it from scratch if your mission changes. If Mark decides to move out of the medical field and into international consulting to not-for-profit organizations, he might keep some items, discard many others, and reorganize everything under a new banner: “I am an independent data analysis consultant seeking not-for-profit clients in Europe and Asia.”

  Always present yourself and your work professionally. In her forthcoming book Excuse Me: The Survival Guide to Modern Business Etiquette, author Rosanne Thomas tells a funny but enlightening story about HR director Mary, who was interviewing candidates for a key position.

  Chloe had the right skill set but her appearance was alarming. A snake tattoo coiled up her arm to her neck, in homage, she said, to her pet snake, “Rumplesnakeskin.” She had multiple piercings in her ears, and wore a tank top sans bra and flip-flops with glittery blue nail polish on her toes. But Chloe was the best of the lot. So Mary offered her the job on one condition: that she come to work appropriately dressed for a conservative insurance company.

  First thing Monday morning, Mary gets a call from her boss. “May I see you in my office? Now!” he shouts, with unmistakable anger in his voice. Mary rushes to his office and sees Chloe sitting demurely outside his door, dressed in what Mary surmises is her version of conservative: a hot pink suit with a plunging neckline and micro-mini skirt, six inch stiletto heels, heavy gold chains and bracelets, extreme makeup, and of course, Rumplesnakeskin in plain sight.

  Your ability to do the work won’t guarantee a job offer. Like it or not, appearances do matter. And they matter in everything you do, whether you’re showing up on the first day of a new job, pitching your services as a pro bono consultant, or displaying your work in a digital portfolio.

  POINTS TO REMEMBER

  1.Choose and label your MBA concentration, making sure that you can find at least four to six courses on that subject.

  2.Complete a Culmination Project in which you apply your skills in a professional setting.

  3.Consider a moonlighting venture as your Culmination Project.

  4.Build an online portfolio where you professionally display your very best work.

  8

  Graduate to the Next Level

  Using Your Self-Directed Business Education to Advance Your Career

  JORIS’S interests range far and wide. He loves learning something about everything, from the names of rare plants and animals to graphic design. As a high school student, the young Dutchman developed a passion for science, but when he went to college, he decided that he didn’t want to major in a purely technical field, so he picked industrial design. While still an undergraduate, he took on an ideal side project for someone who loves learning something new every day: He helped develop a new curriculum for the Scouting Nederland, which coordinates about 1,000 Dutch youth scouting groups. Joris found this work so engrossing that he decided to enroll in a master’s degree program where he would study educational science, with a postgraduate diploma in library science thrown in for good measure—a perfect combination for someone who likes to dabble in a variety of subjects.

  While in graduate school, Joris witnessed the dawn of the MOOC revolution and, not surprisingly, he fell in love with online learning. Suddenly, he no longer needed to limit his studies to a
restrictive degree track. Now he could stay in grad school and still pursue the equivalent of an MBA. Oh, and he would take a little computer science coursework on the side. As graduation approached, Joris began to think seriously about life in the real world. What sort of career would make him happy? Thinking hard about his long-range future, he couldn’t picture himself as a teacher or librarian. How about strategic consulting? It was his favorite business subject. Wouldn’t that field offer new challenges every day? Hoping to impress target employers, Joris began weaving together all the educational patches he had collected into an attractive quilt. As you prepare to transition from studenthood, you too will need to compile a compelling story from your unique set of life, work, and online learning experiences.

  Polish Your Credentials

  M-B-A. Those three letters alone tell a powerful story. Many people hear someone say “MBA” and immediately think “smart, motivated, business-minded, professional.” Your credentials need to inspire similar thoughts in the minds of those with whom you share them. We’ve already talked about finding Career-Self Fit, building a professional portfolio, and making a great first impression. Now we’ll turn our attention to validating your credentials, carving out a thought leadership niche, thinking like a marketer, and acing every career-related interview.

  Readers of the No-Pay MBA blog often ask me, “Without a degree to show for my efforts, will people take my self-directed business education seriously?” The answer begins with putting yourself in the shoes of a boss, a potential employer, or an investor. What sort of credentials will they want to examine? What will impress them the most? Bear in mind the bottom line for anyone looking to hire, promote, or invest in you: “Will this person succeed in this role?” An effective credential demonstrates that your business education was real, rigorous, and reputable. It may take the form of a diploma from a top-ten business school, but don’t assume that an old-fashioned sheepskin is the only thing that counts in today’s world of work. Consider other strong credentials, such as MOOC certificates and the bona fides that come from hard-won experience.

  Imagine that you are an executive looking for someone to help you with a corporate merger or acquisition. As Christian Terwiesch, professor at the Wharton School of Business, once told me, “[Formal] certification is really only needed if you have studied for a long time and you haven’t deployed these skills. If you study a new skill and then deploy it the next day, I don’t need to certify you anymore,” he said. “You can just write on your CV how you’ve completed a successful merger or acquisition. I don’t need to write you a certificate that you’ve studied it. You actually are self-certified for having been successful on the job.”1

  Ideally, you can offer both kinds of proof. In any event, you want to amass a set of credentials that say, unambiguously, “I’ve prepared myself to do this job and to do it exceptionally well.” Treat your credentials as signals you send to the world. A branch of economics pioneered by Michael Spence explores the role of “signaling” in the job market.2 According to Spence and his colleagues, a credential’s most important function is to send a signal about a person’s capabilities. Let’s suppose that the National Electronics Importers (NEI) advertises for a new supply chain manager and says “the ideal candidate should possess an MBA or the equivalent.” NEI is basically saying, “This is what we think we would like to see in a candidate. What do you have to offer?” You won’t get an interview, much less the job, unless you send the right signal to this prospective employer. The right signal could be a certificate from Coursera, relevant on-the-job experience (you managed inventory at Best Buy for three summers), or (best of all) a combination of the two.

  You may know in your heart that you will succeed in a certain position, but you must provide clear and compelling evidence that you are capable of meeting other people’s standards. Having been admitted to a university and earning a degree does that trick. But so does proof that you landed and held a job in the past, a glowing letter of recommendation, a certificate from a brick-and-mortar or online school, an award for excellence, or anything you have published in a reputable publication. References, both written and verbal, make excellent credentials. Ask your manager at Best Buy to write you a strong recommendation, or at the very least make sure he agrees to let you list his name as a reference on your resume. Ditto for internships, volunteer positions, and pro bono work. Keep in mind that job recruiters unanimously agree that work experience trumps every other credential (except in fields with legal requirements for degrees, such as law and medicine).

  Also bear in mind that credentials in emerging fields and industries, such as data analysis and digital marketing, often come from industry players rather than universities. For anyone hiring recruits in such fields, credentials from leading companies (e.g., HubSpot Inbound Marketer, Salesforce Administrator, and Hadoop Developer) may work better magic than a degree on the wall. For example, Willow found that certification from the software company Salesforce sent the best possible signal to prospective employers in her industry. Her demonstrated mastery of the popular Salesforce software, coupled with a resume showing steady advancement at the marketing firm where she worked, put just the right polish on her credentials. The Adviser’s Challenge in Figure 8-1 will get you started putting together your own package of credentials.

  Figure 8-1

  ADVISER’S CHALLENGE

  SHOOT FOR THE STARS

  List everything you can think of that demonstrates your skills and reliability. This might include references from past and present employers, endorsements from teachers and counselors, credentials for coursework (conventional and online learning), degrees you’ve earned in any subject (not just business), documents you’ve published, and anything else that provides external validation. Obviously, a sheepskin qualifies, but so do certificates, letters, awards, and any other tangible proof you can share online or on paper.

  Next, star any item on your list that represents a concrete credential or refers to an impressive accomplishment. If you have completed a short course at Harvard, star it. Do the same if you earned a promotion at any job. Add anything else that shows you are able to succeed by the standards of others, such as an article you published in a respected industry publication. Of course, star any written recommendations from current or former employers.

  Look for gaps in your credentials. If your list includes fewer than six stars, you will want to add several more as soon as possible. Make sure you can realistically accomplish each goal in a reasonable amount of time.

  Design a strategy for filling the star gaps. You should think about specific ways you can accomplish the goals on your list. Name specific courses on specific platforms or specific jobs at specific companies. MOOC certificates can fill in some of the gaps, but rather than buying a certificate for every course you take, choose a few from which you think you will get the most mileage. Seek written recommendations from colleagues, clients, and supervisors who can vouch for you.

  Course series offer an excellent option for anyone’s credentialing strategy. By completing several related courses, you demonstrate your motivation, your commitment to the subject, and your expanding knowledge and skills. For example, Mark earned a certificate indicating successful completion of the ten-course series Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins University, a much more impressive credential than a certificate of completion for a single course, Intro to Data Science. Keep an eye out for new forms of credentials, too. In 2016, the MOOC platform edX announced a slate of new MicroMasters programs. As the name suggests, these courses result in a credential short of a formal master’s degree but do indicate academic rigor and a deep commitment to the subject.

  When it comes to polishing your credentials, having a few big names on your resume can also work to your advantage. Like it or not, people are impressed by an association with Harvard, Stanford, and other big-name business schools. The same holds true for Apple or General Electric or Procter & Gamble. You may not be able get a cre
dential from a Fortune 100 company, but you can obtain impressive experience from any widely recognizable organization. In the world of education, both Wharton and the Harvard Business School offer online courses as well as on-campus workshops for business professionals. MIT’s entrepreneurship boot camp has launched many careers over its short history. Hillary, whose story has appeared throughout this book, found value in earning a Certificate in Social Sector Leadership from the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business. This certificate played an important role in her credentialing strategy because it came from a well-known university—and it did not cost her a penny. Joris used a similar strategy, earning certificates from both Harvard Business School’s online platform, HBX, and from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice. These short, relatively inexpensive credential-bearing programs allowed Joris to include the names of two brand-name institutions on his resume.