Tech Jobs Flourishing Outside Silicon Valley
Technology has started to catch up to banking and consulting as one of the top industries for business school graduates, and it’s not just Silicon Valley schools producing tech-hungry MBAs. A handful of B-schools in unlikely regions graduated more of their students into technology jobs in 2014 than any other industry, according to data the schools provided to Bloomberg for its 2015 business school rankings.
A few schools in Utah, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Southern California all graduated a higher share of MBAs who went into tech than Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Stanford still sent a higher proportion of students into the industry, at 19 percent, than the 16 percent across all full-time MBA programs we ranked.
Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business, for example, sent 43 percent of its MBAs into tech, nearly as high a share as the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Most of the tech workers who graduate from the program, which is ranked 49th out of 74 U.S. full-time programs by Bloomberg, head to jobs at Amazon, Dell, and Intel, said Jennifer Whitten, who directs the school’s graduate career center. They’re not becoming coders, though. Rather, the school trains them to use the management skills that MBA programs commonly teach to big tech companies.
More than ever, prospective students are asking MBA programs how they will position them for a job at a specific tech company, said Daniel Poston, assistant dean at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business (ranked 20th), which sent more than a third of its students into tech last year. “They’ll say, ‘Microsoft is my dream. What will it take for me to get to Microsoft?’ ” said Poston.
