WBS CareersPlus: An integral part of the MBA experience

Global Online MBA participant, Sumit Malhotra, explains the importance of developing a personal career strategy and how the WBS CareersPlus team helped him to manage the direction of his career. 

One of the main reasons for embarking on a MBA journey is to fulfil career aspirations. These aspirations could be in the form of getting promoted internally, transitioning into a different company/sector or starting up your own business. However, the practical aspect of achieving these goals successfully has more to it than just pure academic grades, assignments and dissertations.

To drive maximum benefit from the MBA, one really needs to develop a personal career strategy. After all, the 60-30-10 rule for career success is also somehow the most well kept secrets. 60% of our career success comes from the network we develop, 30% from our personal branding and only 10% from the work we actually do.

The WBS CareersPlus team really helped me intentionally manage the direction of my career. The framework offered here is rich and has a multi-dimensional approach. In fact, it was in a Careers session run by Sarah Jackson at a WBS Open Day, that I finalised my decision to pursue my MBA at WBS.

Within two months of starting the MBA, I was head-hunted to make a transition into a commercial role from a quantitative role, something that I had unsuccessfully attempted over the past four years. The CareersPlus workshops and webinars were instrumental in changing my mind-set around the hiring process and how to appropriately present the value I bring to the hiring firm. While it is not uncommon to take a temporary dip in pay and title while transitioning into new verticals, the WBS negotiation skills webinar really helped me not to just keep my ‘Director’ title but get a significant pay rise on top of my previous salary, which was already very decent.

Since then, utilising the personal self-assessment tools, I have understood the importance of playing to my strengths and uncovered areas of expertise that I was unaware of. Combining this with the principles of personal branding and networking offered, I started my own consultancy at the beginning of this year, offering project management, organisational effectiveness and executive coaching.

WBS CareersPlus really goes all out to offer a well-laid out career management programme from start to finish, and at the same time, makes it really easy to pick out individual modules for immediate use. Add to this a variety of formats to consume the content in, through online modules, webinars, workshops and one-to-one sessions, it offers a lot of flexibility to meet the individual needs of students. Furthermore, CareersPlus also offers pragmatic and effective advice on how to leverage your dissertation towards planning and actualising future career moves as well as raising your profile. 

The genuine passion that Sarah Jackson and the WBS CareersPlus team bring is infectious and led to Diana Popescu and myself launching a social learning platform – something I would have never imagined at the start of my MBA. The series is aimed at providing a peer-to-peer learning platform, where WBS MBA students share their real-world insights and expertise on hot topics and current trends across industries. 

I would highly recommend and encourage MBA students to make the most out of the CareersPlus resources and integrate it organically as part of your MBA experience to derive maximum benefit from the programme!

Find out more about our Global Online MBA options.