This year’s business school graduates are looking for work right on time: More companies want to hire them than at any point in the past decade, a new report shows.
As Bloomberg reports, corporations around the world say they will hire considerably more MBAs in 2015 than they have in any single year since 2003, according to projections by the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the GMAT. In its annual survey of corporate recruiters, GMAC found that 84% of companies globally say they will hire people with master’s of business administration degrees, up from 74% that brought on new MBAs last year. The jump is the largest year-over-year rise in projected MBA hiring since 2011.
MBA hiring will ramp up the most in the U.S., where 90% of employers said they would be filling desks with new B-school grads, up from 82% last year. Meanwhile, in recession-emergent Europe, companies’ intentions to hire edged upward but stayed lower than other regions. Just 56% of employers in Europe said they wanted to hire MBAs, compared to 75% in Asia and Latin America.
The demand for MBAs was highest in the energy and utilities sector, where 96% of companies said that they wanted to hire recent grads and that most of the new hires would work in jobs related to finance or general management. Technology was the second-neediest industry: 93% of tech companies plan to make room for B-school alums, mostly to work in marketing.
Most companies will raise salaries for MBAs, though only one in five said it would boost pay by more than the rate of inflation. The typical MBA can expect to earn around $100,000 in starting salary. That’s slightly higher than the median offer in 2014 but almost double what the typical college graduate will make this year, GMAC says.
