This table is pretty durn self-explanatory so we’ll just start with that:
We’re posting this in the “profile assessment” category as a tool to invite you to self-assess your own skills, with this new knowledge that a) perhaps you have either a limited view of what an employer-valued skill actually looks like in practice, and broadening that view could be useful, and/or b) now that you’ve been in the working world for 2, 4, 8 years or whatever, examining the extent of your skills based on where you’re at today, as a competent professional, might allow you insight into what else you can present in your apps.
You can expect that employers seeking to hire graduating MBAs will have even higher expectations of abilities and performance — including a slew of others such as working knowledge and core competencies of technical skills like reading a financial statement and understanding accounting. You’re not expected to know all that now, but the process of applying is about showing the adcoms how you have something already that you can offer to the companies later on, and then establishing what more you seek from the MBA in order to build on that, to become a bright shiny package of valuable new-hire that these recruiters will want to snap up.
Looking over an eye-opening chart like this may be instructive. These types of evaluations can help in your gap analysis. Many (not all) adcoms will be viewing your candidacy through a recruiter’s eye. They’ll want to make sure you’re going to be a good product that they can spit out into the recruiting pipeline, for their own customers (the hiring companies) to pick up at a premium.
That may be oversimplifying but it’s one aspect to how the system works.
Tell us what you think.