Navigating Career Growth: Is an MBA Right for You?

They feel like the people that were at school or at varsity with them are doing better in their careers and so they start to wonder what else they should be doing . And one of the things that comes up quite a lot is the question of doing some kind of education course , and most of the time it's going to be an MBA .

Sometimes it's going to be kind of a more specialist you know program in management or a you know some kind of other course . And then I get the question is it worth either taking time off work you know if it's an MBA , for example , taking a whole year off work and the cost of the MBA or doing it part-time ?

And actually you know working for two years on your MBA while you're working , sacrificing , you know , leisure time , family time and the expense of doing the MBA ? And I think it's not a simple yes or no answer as to whether an advanced degree will certainly improve your career . I think that a lot of people struggle in their careers for different reasons .

So , for example , they'll find themselves in a bad situation with a particular company or particular boss and then they wonder if a new educational thing will change the situation , and I think you need to understand that doing an MBA , for example .

A lot of people have got great value out of MBAs , but for me , when I was an employer at a big company now I'm an employer at a small company but whenever someone came to me within my business and said they want to do an MBA , what I knew is that they were unhappy in their job and sometimes we could fix the issue with the job or fix the issue with

the team that they were in , but a lot of the time they were just unhappy with the whole career and actually looking for a way to change their careers . So for me , it just meant that I knew that that person was .

Whether they did the MBA or not , they were probably leaving the business , and that's a reality that a lot of employers would kind of understand when they see their staff coming to them asking them about doing an MBA , or so .

I think it's a tricky question to ask your employers if they'll pay , and unless it's part of a very particular kind of management growth program , I'm not always sure that an MBA works .

Where it has a huge application is if you're currently in a specialist role or a scientist or somebody that studied things that don't relate to business , that their career is plateauing because they're in a very particular specialist field and they want to go into more general management .

So someone in that position , I think doing an MBA gives you very good exposure to a range of different disciplines , understanding how the world works outside of your narrow field , and in that respect I think it's a really good thing to do .

But if you're a , you know , if you're kind of an accountant , you've studied accounting , you've done your honors , you're now in your career and you know let's say you're not even in accounting but you've got a business background in your degree doing an MBA because you want to advance your career , I'm not always convinced that that's going to work .

I think I can see the appeal of doing something more specialist . So , for example , if you're an accountant but you actually want to go into fund management , then doing a CFA that makes sense .

Or if you want to go into financial planning , doing a CFP that makes sense , I'm not convinced that an MBA would work for you and a lot of the time I think it's people that are kind of just dissatisfied and I think that actually working out why you're unhappy and what it is that you actually want to do would be much more helpful than putting yourself through

two years of torture to do an MBA where at the end you might find that actually nothing really changes . You know your company didn't really need the skills that you've now gained from your MBA . Other employers potentially might not find your new skill set as exciting as you thought and a lot of the time it can lead to disappointment .

So I think a lot of the time you can kind of get new stimulation uh , you know , for for your brain , for your career , from doing , you know very specialist short courses . You know so doing . You know go and do a coding course . You know go and do something on artificial intelligence , go and do a coaching course .

All of those things I think are very valuable , uh , when you're , when you're working in you know , and trying to move yourself forward , you know adding , adding different skill sets .

In short , punchy kind of studies would make a lot more sense to me than kind of doing a very generalist kind of degree like an MBA and hoping that that's going to solve all your problems .

So I think for me , just understanding why you want to study more and where you want to go with your studies is much more important than just diving in because your friends told you to do it .

And a lot of the time that seems to be the outcome from , kind of when I ask people why it is that they want to do a particular new course , it's because they've asked their friends and their friends might get other businesses and then they compare themselves and then they move forward .

And I think that's maybe my bigger point here is you know , when you're in your career doing what you want to do with your life , understanding that you might be happy with what it is that you're doing and you might actually be happy with the way that you're earning and all those things are going well .

Where you become unhappy is when you kind of put your head up and you look around and you go and talk to people that you studied with and you ask them what they're doing and they kind of give you a hint about how much money they're making and how well they're doing and how much they love their jobs . And then you start to feel unhappy .

So , just to understand , you weren't unhappy before , you're unhappy now because you're comparing , you know , and and now kind of FOMO fits in , you know , fear of missing out , and and this comparison thing is actually a load of nonsense , because when you look around and you ask your friends and acquaintances what they're doing and you see the cars they're driving and

you think about the money that you believe they're earning , you need to understand you know nothing about their lives . They are kind of giving the equivalent of the Facebook life . You know the Instagram life . They're showing you what they want you to see . The Instagram life . They're showing you what they want you to see .

They're not showing you how their lives actually are . And , believe me , I know a lot of people in high-earning careers and most of them they're not that happy . They end up spending far too much time at work .

They end up taking on enormous amounts of debt to pay for the beautiful car that you see , to pay for the beautiful outfits and the fantastic house , but they don't own those things .

Actually the bank owns them and what they're doing is they're projecting their best life , but their best life is costing them a huge amount of time , a huge amount of money and a lot of dissatisfaction . And so kind of looking around and living your life by comparison . You just need to know and I'm sorry to use the words , but it's a fool's game .

You're being fooled into looking around and I think I can't tell you how many people make this mistake . They're dissatisfied with their lives actually because they think they're missing out and other people have got it better than they have and they spend their lives comparing themselves to everybody else . Such a waste of time .

And you see people like that later in life , late in their careers , they start to kind of get unhappy because they realize they've been living through kind of a mirror , a mirror of what they think other people do . And somewhere along the line they eventually grow up and they eventually realize nothing's that amazing when you look around .

Everybody's got issues and actually what you've got and the way you live is probably not that bad at all . You just need to get comfortable with it . So , understanding that when you're looking around trying to change your careers , I think the core question is really to ask yourself why . What is it that I'm not happy about ? And don't make it small reasons .

You know that your boss wasn't friendly to you or they didn't give you that extra day of leave . It's got to be real big stuff . You know jobs are hard to come by . Good careers are difficult to get into and difficult to maintain . And if you have one , you know , do the little things . The little skill sets show up every day .

Add new skills to what you already have , even if they're not exactly in your job , to make yourself more valuable , more current , and that's very important , that's worth doing . Stay curious , keep learning new skills All of that's a really good idea .

But thinking that you're going to get some kind of a magic wand called an MBA and that's going to solve all your problems all that's going to happen is you're going to be even unhappier because now you've set yourself back two years , huge amounts of work .

Mbas are not kind of risk-free when it comes to relationships and the like , because you kind of become very selfish for two years while you focus on yourself and your career and if it doesn't deliver what you believe it will deliver , you can kind of get really depressed and then you've taken two years out of family life as well .

I'm not discouraging people from doing MBAs . What I think is you need to know why and you need to know the real value of what you're actually aiming for .

Just simply thinking that it's going to be a step up , I'm afraid it could be a step sideways or eventually a step down , because it becomes a career breaker , relationship breaker and potentially very expensive exercise . So I think just be careful . That's really my core thing here is focus on making yourself more valuable .

Don't worry about what everyone else has or hasn't got , because you actually don't know their whole situation , unless they show you their entire balance sheet the debt as well as the assets , as well as the income . You can't compare and don't worry about them .

You know you're running your own race and the kind of the biggest ally you've got is the person in the mirror .

You know , looking at yourself every day and saying actually , kind of , I'm okay , I'm happy with where I am , but it's also the biggest enemy , because if you are looking in the mirror and grumpy with what you think everyone else has , you are the problem , not your career . I hope that helps and thank you so much for all your questions .

Please keep sending them in and we'll keep answering them .