How to Prepare On Your Work Experience For B-School Interviews Part -1

How to Prepare On Your Work Experience For B-School Interviews (Part 1 of 3)

Internationally most B-Schools aspirants prefer to get an MBA  after at least some amount (and more often than not after heavy)  work  experience. India is an exception to this rule with a huge chunk of people who make up the b-school junta being students who are get in directly after their graduation. The personal reasoning behind the same be anything from a higher pay package or a genuine want for managerial roles (or despise for non managerial ones) . But there is still a pretty good chunk of aspirants with some amount of work experience and for them preparation for the MBA interviews includes preparing for questions on their work experience. This amount of people with work ex depends on the college, with some colleges preferring more people with work ex, while other colleges going with the other stand. Some colleges are also known to alternate this bent batch after batch.

At the interview stage , questions on work ex for people with the same are inevitable and this is very tricky for a lot of people as there is a lot of balancing to be done as you want to sound egar enough for the MBA but at the same time without sounding too egar to make the MBA seem like a escape from a terrible job.  Also looking at the glass as half full, it is definitely an opportunity to exhibit skills in work place that could match what they are looking for in a MBA student helping your objective of getting the coveted seat.

Looking at this we bring you a four part series trying to cover some basic guide lines that you could try adhering to while preparing for work experience related questions for your interview. In what follows we will try to give you an idea of some common do’s and don’ts that you could use while preparing for personal interview questions based on your work ex

1.    The first and arguably the most important rule is Don’t Bitch!. This is true when you switch jobs and even more so while sitting in an interview.  Whatever people say outwardly, no one generally likes someone who whines and bitches about their present or previous employer. Of course this is not to say that there might be professors who think that work place conflicts or dissatisfaction is natural and justified. But problem is that it is too high a risk to take when you are interviewing for that coveted seat in your dream institute. On the other hand you just can’t go wrong with highlighting the positive aspects of your job and company with some acceptable bad aspects thrown in for measure to make it sound genuine. If you dig deep enough you will surely find some positive learning’s that will make sense from a MBA perspective.

2.     Conflict resolution On a related note to the previous point, one common question about work during interviews is “Describe one area where you successfully handled a conflict situation?”. There is a greater chance of getting this if you have gone ahead and mentioned about some “leadership” or “administrative” role. Here besides adhering to the “Don’t Bitch” rule you have to use the knack of criticizing the situation and not the people involved. This is an important skill in practical scenarios too as when something goes wrong, pointing fingers will not set it right. Resolution of the issue will depend on how you pick up the pieces and collaborate with the stakeholders to come out with a solution that is acceptable to all. So what does all this mean? To take a practical case, imagine your appraisal was not as good as you expected and you had a bad relation with your manager (obviously not a good example to use in a interview but we’ll use this to try and demonstrate the technique). Instead of starting with something like “The manager had no clue what I did and badly evaluated me”, you could probably talk about “I was not happy with the growth opportunities within the company. Even though it could probably be put down to the economic recession, at a personal level I think that I can better utilize the early years of my career by being in a position to learn more and in the end better leverage by skill set and get the right growth opportunities once I do my MBA.” You need to be ready with similar clarifications on what were your growth expectation and what you based that assumptions on etc.

3.    Avoid fake work experience claims. A lot of people today get fake certificates from family/friend owned concerns with “consultant” work experience details since they are easy to get. Though it will seem like a good idea to cover up a year that you dropped for preparation or lost due to some other reason or to show as part time work during your gradation, in our opinion it is a whole lot of trouble for nothing much in return. Other than being a highly unethical thing to do, from a practical side be aware that the professors will be wary about such claims and will scrutinize you in the interview in ways that will easily verify the authenticity of claims. Any if you get caught, it’s a instant kick out from the process as integrity and ethics is highly valued by the b-schools especially in light of recent thrust on corporate governance related debates. But this is not to discourage the people who have actually done such work, in which case they should definitely state the same in their resume/interview , but at the same time extend the maxim of going 10 levels deep to maybe 100 levels deep so as not to be mistakenly thought of as a fake.

To be continued...