Wake Up Call to My MBA Generation

by Ricardo Garcia-Amaya 

March 2011

Throughout my full-time MBA program, I had the opportunity to meet and work with very smart people who had various types of industry experience. It was a great period in my life, during which I was introduced to an incredible number of problem-solving approaches applicable to a wide variety of industries and many types of enterprises.

I am definitely one who strongly recommends the MBA path to many of my friends and family. However, business school is a two year period during which you find yourself confined in a bubble. In the last few years, the standards of what constitutes a well-established personal brand dramatically evolved and caught off guard many recent MBA graduates, as well as the educational institutions that have always been at the forefront in promoting its importance. I am referring specifically to an individual's online personal brand.

Three years ago, a person with an MBA was fulfilling his or her online personal brand effort simply by establishing an online presence. Listing a profile on LinkedIn constituted establishing an online presence. Today, the new generation of MBAs have to be professional bloggers, influencers, and early adopters. 

We are entering into an era of executive recruiting, in which the CV no longer carries the weight it used to. Your personal online voice will replace your CV. You are who your blogs, industry, peers, and followers say you are. And that is why this is a wake-up call to my MBA generation.

Blogging: In Search of Your Online Voice

Over the past five years, global brands have been struggling to find their online voices through endless experiments with ads, content, and sponsorship campaigns. Some have found them, and some continue to search. Now it's our turn, as MBAs, to look for ours. Fortunately, our brand is much simpler to manage. All we need to do is write about what we are passionate about and feel proud of, and share it with our networks. However, finding our online voice takes a lot of practice and hard work.

Most technology leaders write at least one monthly blog. Only a select few are natural writers. Most leaders who blog (notice I am not speaking about individuals whose jobs are to blog) have confided to me that it takes them half a Sunday, or anywhere between 4 and 6 hours, to feel comfortable posting their content.

The great advantage of blogging, for an MBA, is that you will reach a point where your online voice will speak for you, and it will eventually coneect you with a new career direction or challenge you will want to embark on. Increasingly, hiring at the executive level in the technology world is based on the online voice-through blog posts, micro-blogging (Twitter), and online peer trust-rather than through CVs. This trend will continue to infiltrate every industry, and the best thing to do is prepare for it.