Continuing with our interview series on ‘MBA as a career option’, Connect2mba brings you yet another exclusive interview with Vishal Jain.

Vishal is Regional Manager with Zylog Systems (Europe) Limited based out of London, and is primarily responsible for ZSL’s Banking and Financial Services solution offerings.  He has 8 years experience in several areas of Banking and Capital Markets, with particular focus on global sourcing. He has worked with some of the major technology and outsourcing players from the US, India and Europe, including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Accenture and Atos Origin.  Vishal has also assessed and advised a few UK government captive projects on outsourcing and transformation strategies.  He is currently leading business development initiatives focusing on ZSL’s mobile applications for financial institutions, government, media and other enterprises. Vishal has a Bachelor’s degree in Production Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Surat and an MBA from SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai.

Vishal’s long-standing and rich experience in the industry provides for a great insight into viability of MBA as a career option.

It has sort of become a norm today that the next logic step to engineering for any good student should be an MBA. Being an engineer and MBA yourself, do you really think that this is right? According to your experience in a B-school and in the industry, who should look to aim for an MBA?

In India, an MBA is generally associated with a well paying job and higher status as compared to others in the same age group and experience. This widely held belief is a complete myth which eventually ends up shattering the dreams of many of the students who could have proved their mettle elsewhere.

I see either of these two objectives as the reason to pursue an MBA -

• Improving your marketability – Most of the undergraduates see this as one of the biggest reasons behind pursuing an MBA. The time they spend in a B-School provides that additional impetus to get them industry ready. Given the state of most of the undergraduate institutes in India an MBA is considered a ticket to a well paying job. However, what they do not realize is that the funnel does not get narrower even after this. The sprawling number of institutes (without adequate attention on quality and infrastructure) do not help therefore “Garbage in Garbage out”.
• Career advancement or changing track – Most of the experienced individuals or some undergraduates who want to pursue a specific field see MBA as a stepping stone towards their desired interest area. Some of them are prompted by the fact that they do not see much room for growth and are not able to manoeuvre further in their career.

Where it all goes wrong is that in most of the cases you can achieve both of them even without an MBA. Students should start experimenting early on at their undergraduate level to see their fitment and devote sufficient time to getting their basic understanding right.

An MBA will not help you to get on the top of the management ladder or avoid the dirty work but it definitely provides an additional pair of arms for the war on the street. Consider an MBA only if you have run out of other options.

As MBAs continuously dominate the l of highest salary packages with high profile roles suddenly a MBA degree has become a ticket to becoming a CEO or MD or the likes. Are these myths? Where exactly does a fresh MBA fit into the framework of an organisation?

Well they are not myths but more of a probability equation. Consider how many MBA graduates land up those million bracket salaries. Even in the top b-schools only 30 out of a class of 200 land with these kinds of offers. So when you extrapolate this and apply it to the top 50 b-schools, it’s more like winning a lottery. An MBA is not a road to becoming a CEO or MD and there are numerous industry heads that do not have a MBA degree. On the other hand most of the MBA’s do not end up being CEO’s as well. It is more likely that they will not become CEO’s because of the higher overrun on the expectations which ends up cancelling the effort applied.

A fresh MBA may fit anywhere from the entry level cadre to senior management position depending on the relevant experience in the industry. However, given the nature of B-school programs in India most of the fresh MBA’s join in entry level positions and there is a growing trend towards filling mid level positions (because of the rising experience profile of students). Irrespective of what level they join, MBA’s are expected to help with business planning, financial numbers, expectations managements (proving that they are better than non-MBA’s) at the unit, department or the organization level, wherever they are assigned to. The point to note here is that the management will expect more from you since they are paying you higher than the average rookie next cubicle. Over a period of time the distinction between an MBA and non-MBA will blur until and unless you stick an MBA badge on your shirt pocket.

Combining both your academic and professional knowledge, please explain to the students about the disciplines available for specialization, the type of people required for each and their future prospects from the industry point of view.

The answer to this is huge, good enough to write two volumes of book. As I said earlier you can also go for a career in singing after an MBA if that is what you love and still make a lot of money because now you also know how to market yourself and (ac)count what you have earned.  An MBA offers varied set of disciplines and most of the student select disciplines based on either

• Their likeness
• Or potential market demand
• Or improve their earning potential  in their prior subjects areas

For each of these you can categorise the following basic requirements

• You are good for any field if you know Microsoft Word/Excel/PPT.
• Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic knowledge is required if you are choosing operations, marketing or finance.
• If you are already in IT and want to go back into IT, you don’t need an MBA.
• Google search is required if you are taking strategy or research roles.
• If you come from non-IT sectors go for the IT sector as this will open up roles in Consulting.
• If you are from IT go for any other non-IT role but avoid IT any cost.

Future prospects are good in any of these roles and to be fair future prospects are more economy driven if you want to grow with the company. However, there are multiple other options if you choose your own path at some point of time.

If we consider Human resources, Marketing and Finance then these are to a large extent a subset of Psychology, Accounting and Quantitative analysis. What according to you does an MBA exclusively provide?

In addition to what I stressed upon earlier, an MBA provides you the following

• All these three things that you mentioned above packed in a nice, lucid manner and served to you in 1 credit and 45 hours of coursework. If you would have studied the same subjects in a traditional master’s course you wouldn’t have the benefit of case studies and may be you wouldn’t have survived the course beyond a day.
• Access to a strong alumni group – some of the old established B-schools (and engineering colleges) have alumni who are sitting in management positions and they always favour their alma mater when it comes to recruitment.
• Platform to reboot – because of the varied nature of the course in the first term and so many extracurricular activities around, you get the time to rediscover yourself.
• Branding – if you are from one of the top 10 or 20, the name always shines in the CV.
• Access to industry – other than this place, you wouldn’t have the luxury anywhere of having so many high profile CEO’s paying a visit to your doorstep to talk about their experiences and gladly take questions.
• Great friends – if you are in a peer group that is already from a strong background its natural that you will learn a thing or two from being in their company.

You have been witness to the growing number of colleges providing PGDM in India as the number of CAT aspirants keeps increasing. Is it worthwhile to do an MBA from any place as long as it is accredited? What should be kept in mind before short listing colleges to apply for?

After having seen the expose on AICTE, accreditation does not carry much value. Apart from a strong pedigree of the institute you should look at what I have written in the question above. Do not go for placements stats, if you are getting all of the above I guess companies would be making a beeline already.

Most foreign universities prefer students with work experience for their MBA course. The Ivy Leagues especially sometimes look for people with more than 3 years of industry exposure. In India there is no such compulsion. What is your view on this? Do you think that a person with work experience can provide more to a class and subsequently derive more from it?

In India, considering the recent trends, work experience is being heavily considered for short listing. Therefore, the trend is picking up and will become main stream very soon. Students with prior work experience definitely add a lot of value to the whole discussion. Most of this is because most of the ideas and concepts have already been tested on the field and the participant holds a view on it. When you put all these people in one class, you simultaneously get access to several of those practical views which no case study can offer in a short span of 1.5 hours. It is more like a nuclear fusion where each of the energised atoms is fusing with the other. On the contrary, a class with freshers is more like a nuclear fission where one single atom is breaking up. Therefore, while the energy levels may be similar or more actually, it tends to gets more theoretical.

Entrepreneurship is at its very nascent stage in India and the advent of internet has provided the impetus. A lot of people believe that a degree in business management is a necessary step before venturing out but consequently get lured by the big pay checks offered. What is your take on the subject? Is an MBA helpful for aspiring entrepreneurs and does the Indian MBA really inculcate enough entrepreneurial spirit?

An MBA is not really important for germinating a business idea. As far as comparing with pay packets is concerned it is a measure of how much risk one is willing to take. After that it all boils down to how much you believe in your business idea and whether there is an infrastructure in place to start this in safe mode option.

Sadly there isn’t. We neither have the infrastructure nor the professors who can inculcate entrepreneurial ideas on a mass scale. We also do not have a culture to support failure or appreciate a failed effort. All these problems add up to the final thing which is lack of confidence and that prevents most of us from trying what we dream of.

 Our MBA programs still imbibe some form of rote learning and our 12 years of anglicised/convent schooling doesn’t help us at all to “question”. Therefore, while Indians are entrepreneurs by spirit, we are trained in such a fashion that by the time we reach puberty most of us have forgotten of the word.

 A classic analogy is a simple experiment that some Russian scientists did with foxes in Siberia. They wanted to understand the evolution of foxes to domesticated dogs and were looking for some form of correlation. They started with fox puppies and then domesticated them for 10 years. The generation that was born to these domesticated foxes carried the same characteristics as dogs. After 20 years nobody could differentiate between the domesticated foxes and dogs.

Moral – An MBA should help us rediscover and refine some of the basic things that we possess in our DNA in order to be successful later on.  

Vishal leaves us on that rather profound note and wishes students luck on their future endeavours.

mba, sp jain, tcs, accenture, atos origin, banking, zylog systems, vishal jain

Last updated 191 days ago by Administrator