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James Tsai is the sort of MBA corporate recruiters covet. He went to a good
prep school, earned a degree with honors from Middlebury College, and made
vice-president in Bank of America's (BAC) international wealth management
group at the age of 26. Today, Tsai is about to graduate, straight A's in
hand, from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a top-rated program
in America. And he's hustling to land his first post-MBA job—in China.
Executive Class strivers like Tsai used to have just one post-grad career
destination, the U.S. Not anymore. "I am doing everything I think I can to
get over there," he says.
Every era has its version of the MBA dream. In the 1980s, it was about
conquering Wall Street and choppering off to the Hamptons. The late 1990s
saw a stampede to Silicon Valley. In the mid-aughts, the gilded, clubby
preserve of private equity beckoned. Now, the emerging narrative is about
steroidal Asia and its promise of growth. At premiere institutions such as
the University of Chicago's Booth School, the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School, and Northwestern's Kellogg, the percentage of MBAs taking
jobs in Asia—including U.S. students like Tsai as well as international
students—has more than doubled in the past five years, from roughly 5% of
the graduating class to more than 10%. "There is a sense that the center of
gravity is shifting," says Julie Morton, Booth's associate dean for career
services.
The number of students taking international jobs usually swells in a
recession, says Kellogg Assistant Dean Roxanne Hori. But Hori and others
believe that the refrain of "Go East, Young Man" is not a short-term
response to the U.S. economic downturn but a structural shift toward an
internationalized, mobile talent market. And right now, Asia is where the
career velocity and opportunity are. "This has never really happened before,
except in little spurts, where you have a fairly large group of talented,
recent MBAs asking for assignments in China, Vietnam, India," says Jeff
Joerres, CEO of global staffing firm Manpower. Adds Richard Florida,
professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management: "I don
't think many of us thought Asia would become the destination for top
Western talent—but it is."
ONE WORD OF ADVICE
For many MBAs, the prospect of making a bigger impact faster is simply too
good to pass up, especially now that the pay packages offered by both
domestic and multinational companies are competitive with those in the U.S.
Shortly before James Crawford, 30, headed to Columbia B-School two years ago
, his dad sat him down in the kitchen of the family's suburban Chicago home.
Think of that scene in The Graduate, only instead of saying "plastics,"
Crawford's father's advice was "Asia." Today, Crawford is pursuing multiple
opportunities there. "I can't imagine a career over the next 30 years that
would not require or give benefit to international experience," he says.
Asia fever has also hit Wharton student Andrew Maywah, 32, who had a cushy
life working at Oracle (ORCL) in Silicon Valley before graduate school. Now
he is juggling offers from three Chinese companies. "It's like the Wild,
Wild West. There is just so much happening there," he says. "I want to be at
the center of it."
So do many Chinese who emigrated to the U.S. when they were young. They find
themselves breaking the news to their families that they're chasing the
same dream that lured their parents to the U.S., only in reverse. (What
better time to leverage the family capital back in the old country?) The
Chinese call these returnees hai gui, or sea turtles, referring to how these
animals always return to their birthplace to lay their own eggs. Then there
are the international students, who until recently would likely have stayed
in the U.S. to learn the soft skills of Western management, and now are
heading straight back home.
Piyush Singhvi, 27, was born in India, grew up in the Middle East, and,
before Wharton, worked at the Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj Capital
, the largest non-state-owned firm in the region. When Singhvi enrolled in
Wharton in 2008 he was certain, he says, that he would stay in the U.S.
after graduation like most of his peers. But then came the financial crisis.
"It was amazing to see how many people came in with the idea that they
would stay in the West, and how that's drastically changed to just the
opposite," he says. "There are a lot more opportunities in the East."
On Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, MBAs swap stories about the adrenaline rush
of working in an emerging market and the joys of geographic arbitrage.
After graduating from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Quan Trinh
, 27, who grew up in Virginia, took a job with Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) in
Shanghai. There she partakes of an upper-crust-Manhattan-type lifestyle—
food delivered to her door every night, a maid who picks up after her, a
balcony apartment in a compound with a pool—at Albany (N.Y.) prices. Add to
the mix that she travels around Asia with top J&J execs, working in the
strategic planning division for the company's diabetes business, and, she
says, "sometimes I have to pinch myself."
STANDING ROOM ONLY
Asian companies used to rarely, if ever, come to American B-school campuses
for recruiting season. Now at Wharton, Chinese firms like heavyweight
investment bank China Investment Corp. and IT firm Tencent are showing up,
says Wharton global careers director Sam Jones. This year, CICC played to
standing-room-only crowds. At Kellogg, India-based Infosys (INFY) and Tata
Group are now on hand for recruiting. The University of Chicago's Booth
School is seeing so much interest from Chinese companies that it recently
opened a career services office in Hong Kong.
South Korea's Samsung Electronics has been on a hiring tear. Last year the
company signed 50 non-Korean MBAs from the top 10 business schools in the U.
S., double the number of 2008, says Samsung Vice-President Kim Keun Bae.
Those 50 were in addition to the dozens of ethnic Koreans that Samsung
scooped up from MBA programs in America. At Kellogg, the company hired 16
business school graduates alone—more than U.S.-based hiring stalwarts
General Mills (GIS) and Procter & Gamble (PG) combined. The new hires work
in Samsung's Global Strategy Group, which does all of its business in
English, advising top Samsung executives on internal consulting projects.
This year the company is on track to again double its hiring of U.S.-born
MBAs. "The young and smart from top U.S. business schools have helped
provide fresh perspectives to our company," says Kim. "Both foreign recruits
and Korean employees learn from each other, and that helps globalize the
company."
In many cases, companies like Samsung are acing out their American rivals in
hiring the very best candidates. Kellogg graduate Jonathan Scearcy, 28, had
30 job offers last year, most from top U.S. companies. But he turned them
all down to take a job at Samsung so he could "get international exposure
early," he says. "If you ever want to be at a C-suite, you have to have a
global skill set and you have to have significant international exposure,"
says Scearcy.
"GROOMING GLOBAL CITIZENS"
Multinationals like Citibank (C), Pfizer (PFE), Eli Lilly (LLY), and Nike
China are also broadening their international programs and amping up hiring
for their Asia divisions. Last fall a phalanx of high-level IBM (IBM)ers hit
premiere B-schools to talk up IBM's new five-year boot camp for its general
manager program. The program gives the new hires massive international
exposure, especially in places like Asia. "We are looking to attract global
citizens," says Peggy Tayloe, IBM's recruiting director. Big Blue recently
flew the recruits to its Armonk (N.Y.) headquarters, where they sipped
cocktails and nibbled canapés in the inner sanctum of the company's plush C
-suite. One of the new hires hobnobbing at the party was Harvard MBA Yashih
Wu, who was born in California and graduated from Princeton University.
Before B-school, she worked on Wall Street and Madison Avenue. But for her
those places aren't the career destinations they used to be. Today, she says
, "It's impossible not to think globally about one's career."
How much longer can the Asian allure hold? With protectionist talk rising in
America, and China trying to put the brakes on its rapidly growing economy,
there's always a chance that Asia could stumble. There's also rising
concern about what the migration East might mean for the U.S.'s competitive
edge. "I can't get out of my head that two-thirds of Silicon Valley
companies were started by non-U.S. citizens," says Manpower CEO Joerres.
What if, after Stanford University, Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin had
returned to his birth country of Russia? What if James Tsai is about to do
the Next Big Thing—but in his dad's old country in Beijing? "The best and
the brightest are leaving," says the Rotman School's Florida. "As a country,
the U.S. has never confronted this before."
James Tsai is the sort of MBA corporate recruiters covet. He went to a good
prep school, earned a degree with honors from Middlebury College, and made
vice-president in Bank of America's (BAC) international wealth management
group at the age of 26. Today, Tsai is about to graduate, straight A's in
hand, from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a top-rated program
in America. And he's hustling to land his first post-MBA job—in China.
Executive Class strivers like Tsai used to have just one post-grad career
destination, the U.S. Not anymore. "I am doing everything I think I can to
get over there," he says.
Every era has its version of the MBA dream. In the 1980s, it was about
conquering Wall Street and choppering off to the Hamptons. The late 1990s
saw a stampede to Silicon Valley. In the mid-aughts, the gilded, clubby
preserve of private equity beckoned. Now, the emerging narrative is about
steroidal Asia and its promise of growth. At premiere institutions such as
the University of Chicago's Booth School, the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School, and Northwestern's Kellogg, the percentage of MBAs taking
jobs in Asia—including U.S. students like Tsai as well as international
students—has more than doubled in the past five years, from roughly 5% of
the graduating class to more than 10%. "There is a sense that the center of
gravity is shifting," says Julie Morton, Booth's associate dean for career
services.
The number of students taking international jobs usually swells in a
recession, says Kellogg Assistant Dean Roxanne Hori. But Hori and others
believe that the refrain of "Go East, Young Man" is not a short-term
response to the U.S. economic downturn but a structural shift toward an
internationalized, mobile talent market. And right now, Asia is where the
career velocity and opportunity are. "This has never really happened before,
except in little spurts, where you have a fairly large group of talented,
recent MBAs asking for assignments in China, Vietnam, India," says Jeff
Joerres, CEO of global staffing firm Manpower. Adds Richard Florida,
professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management: "I don
't think many of us thought Asia would become the destination for top
Western talent—but it is."
ONE WORD OF ADVICE
For many MBAs, the prospect of making a bigger impact faster is simply too
good to pass up, especially now that the pay packages offered by both
domestic and multinational companies are competitive with those in the U.S.
Shortly before James Crawford, 30, headed to Columbia B-School two years ago
, his dad sat him down in the kitchen of the family's suburban Chicago home.
Think of that scene in The Graduate, only instead of saying "plastics,"
Crawford's father's advice was "Asia." Today, Crawford is pursuing multiple
opportunities there. "I can't imagine a career over the next 30 years that
would not require or give benefit to international experience," he says.
Asia fever has also hit Wharton student Andrew Maywah, 32, who had a cushy
life working at Oracle (ORCL) in Silicon Valley before graduate school. Now
he is juggling offers from three Chinese companies. "It's like the Wild,
Wild West. There is just so much happening there," he says. "I want to be at
the center of it."
So do many Chinese who emigrated to the U.S. when they were young. They find
themselves breaking the news to their families that they're chasing the
same dream that lured their parents to the U.S., only in reverse. (What
better time to leverage the family capital back in the old country?) The
Chinese call these returnees hai gui, or sea turtles, referring to how these
animals always return to their birthplace to lay their own eggs. Then there
are the international students, who until recently would likely have stayed
in the U.S. to learn the soft skills of Western management, and now are
heading straight back home.
Piyush Singhvi, 27, was born in India, grew up in the Middle East, and,
before Wharton, worked at the Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj Capital
, the largest non-state-owned firm in the region. When Singhvi enrolled in
Wharton in 2008 he was certain, he says, that he would stay in the U.S.
after graduation like most of his peers. But then came the financial crisis.
"It was amazing to see how many people came in with the idea that they
would stay in the West, and how that's drastically changed to just the
opposite," he says. "There are a lot more opportunities in the East."
On Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, MBAs swap stories about the adrenaline rush
of working in an emerging market and the joys of geographic arbitrage.
After graduating from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Quan Trinh
, 27, who grew up in Virginia, took a job with Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) in
Shanghai. There she partakes of an upper-crust-Manhattan-type lifestyle—
food delivered to her door every night, a maid who picks up after her, a
balcony apartment in a compound with a pool—at Albany (N.Y.) prices. Add to
the mix that she travels around Asia with top J&J execs, working in the
strategic planning division for the company's diabetes business, and, she
says, "sometimes I have to pinch myself."
STANDING ROOM ONLY
Asian companies used to rarely, if ever, come to American B-school campuses
for recruiting season. Now at Wharton, Chinese firms like heavyweight
investment bank China Investment Corp. and IT firm Tencent are showing up,
says Wharton global careers director Sam Jones. This year, CICC played to
standing-room-only crowds. At Kellogg, India-based Infosys (INFY) and Tata
Group are now on hand for recruiting. The University of Chicago's Booth
School is seeing so much interest from Chinese companies that it recently
opened a career services office in Hong Kong.
South Korea's Samsung Electronics has been on a hiring tear. Last year the
company signed 50 non-Korean MBAs from the top 10 business schools in the U.
S., double the number of 2008, says Samsung Vice-President Kim Keun Bae.
Those 50 were in addition to the dozens of ethnic Koreans that Samsung
scooped up from MBA programs in America. At Kellogg, the company hired 16
business school graduates alone—more than U.S.-based hiring stalwarts
General Mills (GIS) and Procter & Gamble (PG) combined. The new hires work
in Samsung's Global Strategy Group, which does all of its business in
English, advising top Samsung executives on internal consulting projects.
This year the company is on track to again double its hiring of U.S.-born
MBAs. "The young and smart from top U.S. business schools have helped
provide fresh perspectives to our company," says Kim. "Both foreign recruits
and Korean employees learn from each other, and that helps globalize the
company."
In many cases, companies like Samsung are acing out their American rivals in
hiring the very best candidates. Kellogg graduate Jonathan Scearcy, 28, had
30 job offers last year, most from top U.S. companies. But he turned them
all down to take a job at Samsung so he could "get international exposure
early," he says. "If you ever want to be at a C-suite, you have to have a
global skill set and you have to have significant international exposure,"
says Scearcy.
"GROOMING GLOBAL CITIZENS"
Multinationals like Citibank (C), Pfizer (PFE), Eli Lilly (LLY), and Nike
China are also broadening their international programs and amping up hiring
for their Asia divisions. Last fall a phalanx of high-level IBM (IBM)ers hit
premiere B-schools to talk up IBM's new five-year boot camp for its general
manager program. The program gives the new hires massive international
exposure, especially in places like Asia. "We are looking to attract global
citizens," says Peggy Tayloe, IBM's recruiting director. Big Blue recently
flew the recruits to its Armonk (N.Y.) headquarters, where they sipped
cocktails and nibbled canapés in the inner sanctum of the company's plush C
-suite. One of the new hires hobnobbing at the party was Harvard MBA Yashih
Wu, who was born in California and graduated from Princeton University.
Before B-school, she worked on Wall Street and Madison Avenue. But for her
those places aren't the career destinations they used to be. Today, she says
, "It's impossible not to think globally about one's career."
How much longer can the Asian allure hold? With protectionist talk rising in
America, and China trying to put the brakes on its rapidly growing economy,
there's always a chance that Asia could stumble. There's also rising
concern about what the migration East might mean for the U.S.'s competitive
edge. "I can't get out of my head that two-thirds of Silicon Valley
companies were started by non-U.S. citizens," says Manpower CEO Joerres.
What if, after Stanford University, Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin had
returned to his birth country of Russia? What if James Tsai is about to do
the Next Big Thing—but in his dad's old country in Beijing? "The best and
the brightest are leaving," says the Rotman School's Florida. "As a country,
the U.S. has never confronted this before."
4 comments:
One concern that I have is, is the salary level for a position in China high enough to pay off the expense of doing the MBA program? let's say if there's no scholarship and the student has to self fund it, which is quite common I guess.
Good articles. Keep it going, guys.
Btw, i like the banner of this blog.
Stan, only if you get global pay...
That's a valid concern, especially if you choose to go into industry (namely, not consulting or banking).
From what I've heard, J&J, Eli Lilly, DuPont etc. offer anywhere between 450K and 650K RMB. GM is notorious for low MBA salaries, offering about 400K. I'm not sure about Samsung and other electronics companies, but their pay should be higher than GM's at least.
These are just base salaries.
To me that's not bad, but that's because I have other reasons to go to China, including some of those mentioned in this article. For others who are more concerned about ROI, it might be better to stay in the US for the first couple of years before heading East.
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