When Sarah Rumbaugh enrolled at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in 2013, she planned to launch her own business soon after graduation.
As Bloomberg reports, Rumbaugh figured the MBA would provide her with the skills to help her do that and build a network of contacts. Darden’s program, which includes an incubator for student-run startups, venture capital workshops, and design courses, appealed to her. Rumbaugh followed through on her plan a year before completing the program.
In 2014, she co-founded RelishCareers.com, a recruiting platform that matches graduate degree recipients with employers. The venture has received $1.2 million in funding over the past three years.
Darden is among a handful of the U.S.’s top business schools, along with MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Stanford Graduate School of Business, that are trying to attract students like Rumbaugh by offering entrepreneur-focused programs.
For students planning to pursue a more traditional career with a bank or consultant, such programs aren’t much of a selling point.
Recruiters say the skills they emphasize—creativity, collaboration, or storytelling—are the least desired by bigger, established employers. That’s the finding from a Bloomberg survey of more than 1,000 corporate recruiters who place MBAs. Big and even midsize companies want to hire graduates who demonstrate qualities like leadership and strategic thinking, recruiters say.
Attributes that typify a great entrepreneur can make for a lousy hire, says Derick Kurdy, who works for Johnson & Johnson’s procurement team in New Jersey and recruits about a dozen MBA graduates a year.
“A lot of entrepreneurs don’t like to be told what to do,” he says, adding they get bored easily and don’t always mesh well with corporate culture. In a large organization, he says, “sometimes you just have to do what’s asked of you.”
