For everyone who wants to improve their business acumen, increase their personal brand or become more competitive in the current market consider getting an MBA at certain times in their career.
In today’s market grades don’t matter that much since if you are talented, you can find a job even with minimal qualification.
Tuition and Fees for a two year degree program at a top private college would cost you anywhere up to $130000 in total, if you make $50000 a year that would still take some time to repay. If your expenses are still $45000, the expenses would add up to $90000 for the whole term.
So, a total of $220000 would be the cost of an MBA from any top private college, and even though a MBA can improve your pay by another $11,586 a year. This would only add up to $1.6 Million by the time you retire. If you put the same money of your fees and tuition into a fund you will earn up to $2.1 Million by the time you retire in 40 years.
Anyway, the choice is yours but here are 8 things you can do if you do not join a MBA program:
Open up your Own Business
If you open your own business, the best possible option available to you, you would become your own boss. This would improve your Self Confidence and you would learn more from this experience than if you would get an MBA. At the worst scenario, you will close down your business. But this will give you an insight about the Business management focus which you need to concentrate on.
Develop Strong Sales Skills
Sales are the heart of capitalism, and without it there would be no exchange of goods and services, without which the only exchange would be through taxation and robbery.
Even Mediocre performers who have good sales skills outperform great performers with mediocre sales skills.
This is especially true for entrepreneurs who have an idea to sell to the world, but if you do not have the required skills in selling, and then no investors, customer or talented employee would be attracted to the idea.
With a small portion of MBA Program which include courses on sales and more prestigious program avoid this subject altogether as the belief that marketing trumps sales every time.
Gain Fluency In Another Language
Learning another regional language or foreign language is not only exciting but also beneficial. While this may seem a lot of work, it shouldn’t be difficult to achieve fluency in two years if you spend a few hours per day.
The easiest option to consider even though it is complex would be Mandarin since majority and largest manufacturer of consumer goods. Conversing with Chinese Based businessmen in their native language will give you a distinct advantage over competitors who must use translators.
Write a Book
Writing a book, talking about your personal experience or interests can be a fruitful experience. Don’t get mixed up in terms and consider getting the ‘best-selling’ title as the difficult part. Virtually anyone can get on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller list if they can get enough friends and business associates to buy 2,500 or so advance copies.
Even if $25 was the list price on the book, pre-ordering 2,500 books would come to $2,500. Round that up to an even $75,000 for gifts to your compliant associates and you are still spending a fraction of what an MBA costs.
When it comes to actually writing the book, you can hire a ghostwriter at 50 cents per word and that would only come up to a $25,000 which would come to $100,000, again less than the cost of the MBA.
Even if you write, publish and promote the book yourself and don’t try to game the bestseller lists, a published book is world’s most effective business card.
Join a Startup
You get to experience a little bit of everything while working at a Startup. From handling back end to front end to marketing and promotion, you would get to do it all. Entrepreneurs are some of the best people to learn from and people who work in a startup have a very different mental and professional from of mind.
You can also tutor yourself the ins and outs of an MBA program. You would require a variety of topics in an MBA program, while home tutoring yourself, you are free to cater to your interests. Strategy and marketing, industry-specific lectures, leadership, and public speaking are a few basic attributes that must be learnt in order to have a secure future.
Learn to Code
Learning to code has become a business fad of lately, but it can be a fact that it’s a skill that can positively ripple through everything that you do in business.
Coding requires logical and organized thinking. It forces you to break down something complex into smaller, simpler, discrete chunks, in order to maintain quality and, time and resource management.
Coding also requires you to learn how to create subroutines and place it in various lines of code, otherwise it would mean to update bits of code that do the same thing in multiple places in the program.
Technical programming languages influence the way people think. Quite aside from the technical jargon, understanding a technical discipline makes it much easier to understand and empathize with engineers.
Become a master Storyteller
In this current information age, people are drowning in information. Information has turned from a competitive advantage into a huge burden. Far from becoming an information economy we have moved into an storytelling economy.
People do not want information but want to understand how you, your company and your product fit into their lives.
Most businesspeople know how exactly how to throw data into a spreadsheet and slag a graph into PowerPoint, but few know how to tell a good story.
Pursue a Certification Course
There are tons of courses to choose from both in India and Abroad, which could be highly relevant to your business career. Pursuing an MA or MS instead of an MBA, could also be a great idea since it’ll provide a greater niche in the subject of your choice. These master’s programmers generally add a direct and a more meaningful connection to venture capitalists or small business incubators.
An MBA could be a great professional tool if you know exactly what you want to do with it. I would suggest that you be proactive and study practical alternate development programs rather than going for the text-book knowledge.
