Young Talent Pipeline

AUTHOR: Lachlan Colquhoun   DATE: 14.12.06   ISSUE 2, 2006

Under the CareerStart program, which echoes similar initiatives at top US schools Stanford and the William E. Simon School at the University of Rochester, top undergraduates and identified younger talent already in the workplace will be able to enter AGSM.

“Three decades ago the MBA was very much for career starters, but it has evolved to the point that it is dominated by career changers, and people who might be called career boosters and accelerators,” says AGSM Director Professor Eddie Anderson.

“In the main, career changers are people of around 28 or 29, and they’ve come to the fulltime program after starting in other areas, such as architecture as one example, while career boosters tend to be between 33 and 36, and dominate the MBA (Executive) program.”

For some particularly bright students without business backgrounds, the MBA can be a career-starting degree.

CareerStart brings back the notion that for some particularly bright students, without business backgrounds, the MBA can be a career-starting degree.

The program has two entry streams. The first involves carefully selected students being invited to join the program straight from their undergraduate degrees, or with as little as 12 months work experience.

They will have been honours students or in the top five percent of their class, and they will have achieved a score of 700 on the GMAT entrance examination which is sat by all full-time MBA candidates applying to AGSM.

“These are people who might not have done a lot of miles, but are extraordinarily bright and will be able to carry their own in the class,” says Professor Anderson. “My expectation is that what they lack in experience they will make up for in intellectual capacity.

“In addition to the traditional streams, such aseconomics or commerce, we will also be targeting non-traditional business streams such as science and engineering, and the arts.”

“We will be targeting non-traditional business streams such as science and engineering, and the arts,” says AGSM Director Professor Eddie Anderson.

Photo: Professor Eddie Anderson

In many cases, CareerStart students will have some solid work experience because the modern undergraduate often works up to 15 hours a week while studying, Professor Anderson says. On top of this, many undergraduates have already had exposure to organisational responsibilities, such as running a team.

In the second entry stream, people with between one and three years working experience will be sponsored by employers to undertake an MBA. They will receive a partscholarship from AGSM, while the sponsor will make a $22,000 commitment towards school fees or living expenses.

In both years of the program, CareerStart students will complete the first two terms of the MBA alongside other AGSM full-time students, before joining their sponsoring company as an intern.

At the end of the second year, students will attend AGSM for a final three months. After 27 months, they will have both an MBA and “some excellent commercial experience”.

CareerStart students will have both an MBA and excellent commercial experience.

Corporates are quite aggressively trying to fill their talent pipelines with young people often straight out of university, says Professor Anderson. Under the old model, following an undergraduate degree, an individual would spend three years in a corporate environment before beginning MBA.

“But the fact that so many employers are looking at people in undergraduate programs and putting them through their own leadership and development programs indicates a focus on earlier stages of the talent pipeline.”

While the 2008 MBA program will see the first CareerStart intake, Professor Anderson doesn’t expect younger students to suddenly dominate the school. “My expectation is that if we do well with this then we might have 20 percent of the full-time class being career starters.”