Jeroen Kemperman’s dream was to become a cofounder of a tech startup after graduating from IESE business school. His new project called Treeveo raised €250,000 in just several weeks. One of his projective clients was Hewlett Packard. Sadly, Treeveo was closed only two and a half years after it got started, which happens to many startup companies.
It didn’t go down without a fight, rehashing its business model over and over, but eventually Kemperman realized that it has to be closed.
Kemperman acknowledges that you can’t fight for your business forever, as, while his company bank account dropped to zero, he also had to support his young family.
MBA Students Reconsidering Their Job Options
For new holders of MBA degrees, job options are the crucial thing, Financial Times reports. However, your first ambition isn’t always the best thing for you. According to City University’s Cass Business School’s information, no less than 30% of its alumni (graduates of the full-time MBA) have reconsidered their dream jobs even before they left schools.
A popular reason for students to change their minds is when they cannot obtain a work visa from their prospective employers or when the volatile job market changes again.
However, sometimes the reason for rethinking your career is quite trivial: you just realize that your prospective job looks too boring for you. During the students’ school years, they find out that there are other things that look much more engaging for them than what they previously wanted. When they learn more about the profession they planned to enter before, they learn that some parts of this job are not as attractive as they seemed pre-university.
Now, when a new MBA term is starting, career departments at universities have a lot of work to do. Before the classes start, all students want to discuss their prospects with a job counselor. This window where they can still change direction is quite small, as they don’t have much time left before they have to go back to school.
According to Jane Barrett (The Career Farm, a job coaching service), MBA students get disappointed in their first dream jobs because all they were thinking of previously was what company they’d like to work for, but not about their own role in a business. The best way to find out what you like is to make lists of what the student wants to obtain from their job, like remuneration, prestige and recognition from colleagues. The next step is to prioritize these things. One of them always means to you more than others. It wouldn’t hurt to ask people who worked in similar positions for an inside view of the job, during MBA events or networking meetings.
Changing Your Ambition Doesn’t Always Hurt
At Leeds University Business School, Amit Pandey was an Indian students who moved to Britain to undertake a full-time MBA program. However, he acknowledges that ultimately it would have been better for him to continue playing professional cricket. His aspiration was to work at Communisis, a corporate marketing firm where he had his internship. But when he talked to a Halifax bank IT division director at his cricket club, he realized that he choose his business sector wrong. Before, his goal was to work at strategic management, but that talk changed everything: Pandey sent his CV to Halifax and started working in finance. Recently, he became a vice president of regulatory strategy (Barclays). For him, the decision to switch to finance was pure luck.
Incidentally, Kemperman decided to take on a job for an employer thanks to his business school network. He doesn’t regret getting the job. For him, this job was also a happy accident, as his classmate recommended him a project management position at Google just before Kemperman understood that it was time to shut Treeveo down. Kemperman says that the worst thing in applying for a job was the fear of rejection. After his work at Google started, Kemperman understood that an employee position suited him much better than an entrepreneur’s role. All in all, he feels quite happy with his job – and especially the quite high and steady salary.
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