Are you a software engineer or an IT professional looking for a career change, especially after securing an MBA? Here are some of the key career paths open to you.
1. IT Consulting
This is the most common post-MBA career for professionals with an IT background.
Job titles in this role include Functional Consultant or Business Analyst depending on the firm.
This job involve helping the client find solutions to business problems by defining the problem and then using your past functional knowledge of the domain to draw up the right solution.
The solution might be technology platform agnostic or demand a certain technology solution. It is also possible that the Consultant may or may not actually get the solution implemented. It depends on how the client engagement has been defined.
The core skills needed for this type of career would be analytical skills and business acumen. Some companies offering such jobs include Accenture, IBM, Infosys, HCL etc.
The clients you work on can include large retailers such as Seers, Target and Walmart, companies in the finance domain such as Goldman Sachs or manufacturing companies such as General Motors and Hyundai. Basically, almost every sector is implementing IT in a big way today and your skills as a MBA with IT knowledge would be relevant to a whole bunch of companies.
2. Product Management
Next comes Product Management. As a product manager you play the role of a CEO for the product, doing everything it takes to bring a product to the market and make it grow.
This profile best fits those with some years of experience rather than fresh out of business school.
The job is exciting and will give you a larger canvas to play on than IT Consulting which relies more heavily on your core skills as an IT professional.
Depending on the organisation, product management could include deciding the core features of a product, laying down the product development roadmap, figuring out how to stay ahead of the competition by controlling aspects such as pricing and product performance and ensuring the right exposure for your product by working closely with marketing and sales etc.
This is a broader role and will utilize a lot more of the skills you pick up in the MBA.
3. Business Development
Business Development is a fancy corporate word for Sales and pre-sales roles. This job is also known as Account Management/ Relationship Management depending on the firm.
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This position has a lot of glamour attached, as it tends to be ‘on-site’ which in the IT world means, more often than not, outside the country.
The job however, involves chasing targets, almost on a daily basis, and the novelty wears off soon. So don’t make living the ‘jet-set life’ the only deciding factor.
This is a relatively new job option for MBA grads, since traditionally, an MBA doesn’t focus much on sales. Mostly sales gets tackled as an elective under the Marketing course.
4. Industry
The list of industries is huge and almost every single one is dependent on IT systems to keep its wheels turning. Each one needs its share of generalists and specialists. As an in-house IT expert, you will help the company deploy the IT infrastructure it needs.
This job is not very different from an IT consulting role, except you work for only one client – the company that employs you.
Depending on your own inclinations you could see that as an advantage or a disadvantage. Consulting roles for some reason have long been seen as ‘glamorous’. In reality though, consultants are often travelling 5 days out of 7, working late hours, living out of their suitcase – which is hardly glamorous! Salaries in these roles however tend to be higher, which is a trade off many are happy making.
As opposed to this, industry jobs will be stable and pretty much a 9-5 affair, but could appear to be unexciting to some, because as in-house IT experts, they won’t get to work on multiple clients and different scenarios.
