Show me the money!

Doing an MBA is expensive and represents a big investment for most people. Not surprisingly, knowing the payback time of such an investment can be of the utmost importance. Although I already posted something about the payback time, I really didn’t elaborate too much on salaries. Yes, I know, shame on me!

The post-MBA salary is very important to understand whether this is a worthwhile investment and I get many questions on this, so it’s about time I write something about it!

If you look at the career outcome stats posted on the MBA website, you’ll see that the average salary is around £55.000. After taking the Management Science course, you’ll surely understand any average hides a lot of information, so what does this really mean and what is reasonable to expect after graduation?

Salaries after graduation will vary a lot and so will the type of packages offered. It depends mostly on industry and location. I would say the two areas paying the most are consulting and banking. In these areas, it’s possible to get offers that go from £55.000 up to £90.000, depending on the consultancy name. Top consulting companies tend to reward their employees well, but only a few students will end up landing those top jobs and in most cases you’ll end up giving up your personal and family life.

The industry pays slightly less, but again, it’s highly variable. But these are the ones around the £55.000 mark. Some slightly above, others slightly below. In some well-known companies salaries can be very competitive and be almost at the level of consulting and banking. Usually not-for-profit is around £45.000 to £60.000, depending on the role.

Of course there are other things to have into account when choosing a job, such as sign-on bonus (a common practice in the UK…really makes me feel like a football player!), performance bonuses and other perks.

In terms of region, I’m still under the impression the UK has the highest salaries, following by Germany and the US.

All and all, this means if you land the average package, you should be able to pay your MBA in around 2 years, especially if you get a nice sign-on and annual bonus.

Class numbers

As far as I understand, the Cambridge MBA is undergoing some changes with regards to class size.

I have my own view on increasing the class size. I understand the Cambridge MBA needs critical mass and a good alumni network and that can only be achieve by increasing the numbers and aiming to compete with the 300-plus-student MBAs across the world. It all makes perfect sense from the programme’s point of view and in the future, the alumni community will benefit a lot.

However, it also contributes to killing one of the things that made the Cambridge MBA unique. One of the reasons that made me choose Cambridge was exactly the class size. I thought with the class size of 150, it would be possible to know all my colleagues and get more of a family feeling when attending the course. And that was spot on! I feel like I know a lot about most of my colleagues and I learnt a lot from them.

There’s a lot to be learnt from your colleagues and fewer students also allows us to get to know our colleagues, share experiences, spend time together and connect with them. There is a very strong bond between most of us and we keep in touch regularly. I’m not sure how that would be possible with 300 students.

I think there’s a big trade off between getting the right scale and providing a great experience to the students. I just hope Cambridge is able to keep the right balance and doesn’t become like some of other business schools which resemble more of a mass production MBA-making machine.

The Cambridge email account I don't have

I just received an announcement from my Cantab email account letting me know that if I want the full service account, I need to pay, otherwise I'll be downgraded. The Cantab.net is the official alumni email account for graduates from Cambridge. Most people don't know that because "cantab.net" or the alias "cambridgejbs.net" seem more of one of those email accounts you get for free such as engineers.co.uk or doctors.co.uk.

There are many nice things about Cambridge, but one of the biggests faults is actually one very simple thing: the lifelong alumni email accounts. Harvard, Stanford and all the others give their alumni free lifelong email accounts that are recognisable....using domains such as Stanford.edu. I expected to have a @cam.ac.uk account, with my name and year of graduation, like they do it in Harvard. That doesn't happen in Cambridge. For some reason, we loose our email accounts when we graduate.

How difficult can it be to make sure alumni keep their emails? Wouldn't it also be good for the school to have it's name advertised by the alumni community?

Instead...we have to use a very basic webmail service with cantab.net as domain....honestly, I'd rather use my personal email!