There are things that are not taught even at business schools, but those things will be useful for you in future career, and they are even much cheaper than MBA!
A brief calculation can tell you that tuition fees at a top university cost a lot of money. With other expenses, the sum spent during those two school years could bring you much more if invested at an annual return of, say, 5%.
But then, investing into education is investing into the future. If you look at statistics, though, you’ll discover that a simple bank investment would earn you much more than the pay rise you’ll get after obtaining an MBA.
All in all, earning an MBA loses you a big sum of money – and this unfortunate development could be avoided. Below, you’ll read about four moves cheaper than obtaining an MBA degree.
1. Learn to be a perfect salesman
All businesses would be nonexistent without sales and selling. Having good sales skills will immediately give you a strong advantage in competition.
You can be all brilliant and innovative, but if you don’t know how to sell your invention or idea, it won’t bring you much. That’s why it’s better to combine brilliance with exceptional selling skills.
Of course, it’s exceptionally true for businessmen. Without the ability to sell a business idea, it’s impossible to find clients, employees or investors.
If you’re not an entrepreneur, don’t think this doesn’t concern you. If you’ve ever looked for a job, you must know that it also requires strong sales skills – you have to sell your knowledge and your unique abilities. To stay successful, you need to continue selling your services.
It’s most peculiar, then, that most MBA programs don’t include selling courses into their curriculum. Surprisingly, selling is neglected even by top business schools. The reason for it is everybody believing that a course in marketing renders sales useless.
Of course, sales training courses cater to companies and individuals, so you have a chance to obtain training in this particular sphere. You can also use video-lessons, books and blog posts, most of them absolutely free.
2. Learn a foreign language
Sure, it requires a great amount of effort, but certainly not as much as two full years at an MBA program. If you give only six hours per day to your foreign language, you’ll gain fluency in those same two years with much less cost and effort.
3. Study programming
It may seem that coding is as far from business as elementary school teaching, but, nevertheless, it may come in very handy.
Programming and coding helps you enhance your logic and analysis skills. Time management hinges upon the ability to make complex things simple, and coding is what will give you such knowledge.
With coding, you’ll also learn how to optimize your work. Programmers know that once you write a piece of algorithm, you won’t have to do the same thing over and over again.
Also, programming changes the way you think. You’ll have a great ground to connect with the technical crowd, like engineers.
And, of course, don’t forget that in our modern world all businesses need software to exist. If computers and programming are a mystery to you, then you make a poor entrepreneur.
4. Learn how to tell stories
Our world is overflowing with information. Big data is conquering all our lives and immerses us into a vast ocean of information – often superfluous and unneeded.
That’s why, if you don’t burden your customers with a lot of information about your product, telling them instead why they personally need it, you’ll get much more feedback and acknowledgement.
Everything is about telling stories now – look at all those people who write success stories.
Of course, for most entrepreneurs storytelling is limited to Powerpoint presentations and graphs. That doesn’t mean that they know how to tell a story. To learn more, read about storytelling in literature, find out what stories consist of structurally.
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