Career Guidance Needed: Bachelors vs MBA

[tacpoly]

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@grillandwinemaster wrote:

Hello MyFico Friends, I need a little bit of career guidance and direction, and who better qualified to offer it than MyFico Friends?

I'm 41 years old and I'm considering a career move.  I'm in the process of completing my bachelor's degree in business marketing.  What are the income expectations with someone entering the open market with a bachelors degree?  What are the income expectations with someone entering the open market with an MBA?  I live in Southern California, adjacent to the Orange County and LA County marketplace.  

I have been self-employed all of my working life and I am somewhat disconnected with job market expectations.  I look forward to your guidance and replies with anxious anticipation.  I thank you in advance!

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I have several questions, the biggest being:  if you already have a successful business, why would you want to work for someone else?  Is what you are learning useful to you now?

How far along are you towards your BA in marketing?  What exactly do you want to do with it?  How do you plan to get there -- besides getting the degree?  Most people getting out of college will have had directly related work experience, typically internships, co-ops, summer positions so you will be competing with them.  You will likely need something similar on your resume.   

Most BA/BS level people who get the good jobs (i.e. like the consulting job that Thomas Thumb cited) come from top schools where these firms recruit.  It's an uphill battle to get in if you are currently in a lower tier school unless you have connections.  The same with MBA programs:  the big salaries go to the top people coming out of the top tier schools.  Lower tier MBA programs just get you large student loans -- the exception being when you already have a job and you're just burnishing your credentials.  The same is true for law school programs, btw.  Firms want the best of the best and where they graduate is their way of defining it (it's reductionist, but what can you do).

As for switching to finance.  As a quant, I would suggest looking into how strong you are with numbers first.  Marketing and finance can be very different. 

[wasCB14]

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@grillandwinemaster wrote:

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@wasCB14 wrote:

Based on the Marketing 101 class I took while earning an Accounting degree, marketing strikes me as a field where experience and contacts (not to mention creativity) matter a more than a degree.

One thing to be concerned about is that marketing companies are notorious for having unpaid/underpaid "interns" do the work you might expect permanent employees to be doing. Marketing jobs with decent pay are limited when so many people are willing to work cheaply (or for free) to get experience.

Maybe I'm wrong and that's improved, but I wouldn't be surprised if you find yourself competing for jobs with 20-somethings willing to work for peanuts.

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What are your thoughts on a business management degree vs a marketing degree?  I only choose marketing as a stepping stone to an mba. 

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Frankly, I think both degrees are kind of baloney. Business management expertise comes from experience, knowing how to connect with and persuade people, determination, and industry-specific knowledge. You don't learn any of that from learning low-level accounting and finance, talking about organizational structure, or reading case studies about companies in unrelated industries.

Marketing seems like a field where one in twenty people has a good idea, and the rest just take up space.

[surferchris]

Congrats on your degree progress...