Should I Get an MBA?

Some technical professionals wonder if they should get an MBA to kick-start their career. But unless you are specifically looking to go into management (dev management, product management, or project management), it’s largely a waste of time and money. In fact, even if you do decide to go into a management field it may still be a waste. And this is coming from someone who holds an MBA.

Some may claim that having an MBA from a prestigious school looks great on your resume and opens doors. Sure, that’s certainly the case – if you’re looking for a job in investment banking or consumer product marketing. Otherwise it’s just another shiny star on your resume that attracts attention, but which usually won’t help you make the sale.

So then is an MBA valuable for the things you learn in the program? That depends on whether you actually end up using the material taught there, which is a combination of the following:

• Economics
• Finance
• Marketing
• HR & Organizational Behavior
• Information Systems
• Corporate Strategy
• International Business

If you come from an engineering background you may be surprised by how lightweight most of the MBA coursework is. Perhaps the most difficult classes are in Economics and Finance, and even they do not begin to approach the difficulty of a freshman Computer Science class. Back in business school I found it funny to see Liberal Arts graduates complaining about how difficult our classes were; obviously they did not stay up nights in college trying to digest 1,200-page engineering texts full of partial differential equations.

So if the value of an MBA is not in the coursework, what else is there? Well, some people talk about the added perspectives they gain from the broader business education, but that is a nebulous benefit at best. Nay, the real benefit is something they don’t necessarily tout up front; it’s the interaction skills that you gain from group assignments, and the relationships that you develop with your fellow students.

The value of such skills and networking is difficult to measure, but it is definitely tangible. Still, is it worth the significant opportunity cost of taking two years off of work and going hopelessly into debt? Only you can answer that question. But if you can manage to take an MBA program part time, or better yet, have your company pay for it, that will make the decision much easier.