Is It Worth Pursuing Both a Master’s in Management and an MBA ?
If one already has a Master’s in Management (MiM), pursuing an MBA might seem redundant. At first glance both seems to provide similar skill sets- both provides with a greater level of understanding into the principles and theories of management. However, these programs differ in terms of the rigour of the courses, electives or level of details in the courses and pedagogy. MBA programs are relatively more inclined towards teaching using real life experiences, cases, have component of internships, aims at understanding real world applications of concepts. MiM is generally open to individuals having maximum of 3 years work experience, MBA program generally seeks at least 3 years of work experience from its applicants. Hence, MiM has limited intra-class learnings or learnings from the experiences of the batch. This combined experience of the class makes MBA a great learning ground. If you feel that your career is stalled or want to transition into a different industry, MBA can certainly help you with newer skill sets to make those transition.
Whether to pursue an MBA post MiM also depends on one’s career plan and aspirations. If you are looking for a transition into a different or newer field, say in the consulting or finance or tech-based domains, MBA can certainly help you with the transition. MBA has an advantage that it can provide better networking opportunity with individuals having backgrounds from the industries you were part of, providing ample learning opportunities from a diverse set of batchmates from whom you can get to know the industry in a much better way. If the MiM program in which you graduated, mostly revolved around general management concepts, then it will give you better advantage in pursuing MBA. Especially if you are looking for career progression certain core areas of management like operations, strategies or marketing. Having an MBA with specialisation in these domains brings additional credibility for you get involved in the leadership roles. In addition, if you are looking for international opportunities MBA would be a nice value add to your current skillsets as MiM has limited scope when it comes to international jobs or profiles; or internation exposure like international exchange program or dual degrees in collaboration with foreign institutions.
If you have done MiM from a lesser-known school, you could always focus on getting your MBA from a reputed school and get the desired career transition or salary boost, especially into the roles where the reputation of the school matters. With your degree in MiM, you would have required work experience, better understanding of various industries and your future career plans, which might help you in getting into elite or Ivey league institutes. MBA is generally observed to provide an additional boost along the career trajectory, especially when it comes to reaching the C suite. Please note that MiM with years of specific work experience can equally help you in providing the required boost, but MBA seem to provide similar boost in short time. In the end, it comes down to having a better picture on financial aspects of pursuing MBA. One needs to understand to have a clarity on the cost to benefit ratio or quickly calculating return on the investments. While calculating, find out the trend of the salary increase if you were to remain on the same career path and compare it with projections if you were to do an MBA. MBA graduates generally have higher salaries than MiM graduates. On an average, MiM graduates in USA makes an annual salary in the range of 60K-90K while an MBA graduate in USA makes upwards of 100K, so MBA does provide the desired growth in the salary. However, you need to understand the trade-off between the total expense of pursuing MBA and the post MBA financial prospects. In order to make this decision easier, schools have started offering integrated MiM-MBA programs or offering direct entry to the second year of MBA programs at relatively much lesser prices. These newer offerings by schools makes it easier for MiM graduates to pursue MBA further.
