Job offers for this year’s crop of graduates from Executive MBA and part-time MBA programs is at an all-time high, according to a new study by the Graduate Management Admission Council. Some 76% of EMBA graduates received job offers at the time of the survey, between Feb. 15 and March 18th. It was the highest percentage of offers since 2001 when GMAC first began to gather this information.
The growth in employment offers to EMBA grads outstripped all other graduates of master’s programs in business. About 64% of full-time MBA grads, for example, had job offers—ten percentage points below the EMBA level. GMAC said the increase also coincides with concurrent growth in the number of EMBA students who were seeking jobs after graduating from their executive MBA program. In 2011, only 10% of executive MBA students were seeking employment as compared with 16% who were job hunting in 2012.
Percentage of Job Seekers With a Job Offer, by Graduation Year & Program Type
One disappointing piece of news for EMBAs: on average they had 1.5 job offers each, down from a high of 2.6 in 2008 and slightly down from 1.6 last year. That was the lowest number of offers in any of the categories tracked by GMAC (see table below). In contrast, full-time MBA graduates reported 2.0 job offers each.
Average Number of Job Offers, by Graduation Year & Program Type
Success in landing a job offer varied depending on where students chose to attend their graduate business program. Overall, two-thirds (68%) of those seeking employment while attending school within their country of citizenship (domestically) received or accepted an offer for employment, in contrast to the 50% of foreign students (those attending school outside their country of citizenship) who had received job offers at the time of the GMAC survey.
“Variations between domestic and foreign students’ success in obtaining job offers were most pronounced when examined by the regional location of the student’s school,” GMAC said. For example, U.S. citizens attending school domestically within the United States had a much higher success rate (64%) in receiving job offers than did foreign students attending school in the United States (43%). In Europe, however, citizenship played a lesser determining role in employment outcomes, with domestic students (59%) and foreign students (55%) almost equally as successful in securing a job offer upon graduation.
GMAC found that roughly one-third (33%) of graduating students intend to stay with their current employers after graduation. These students report an expected 36% increase in their pre-degree salary, on average. For students who had at least one job offer at the time of this survey, those who saw the largest gains between pre- and post-degree salaries were full-time two-year MBA students (81%), up eight points from the class of 2011. Part-time MBA students, by comparison, reported gains of 53%.
The results of the survey were based on responses from 5,366 recent or soon-to-be graduates of business schools worldwide. The study was released on May 21, 2012.
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