Identifying where your business skills come from: Part II
Your education also plays a defining role in your business skills
Obviously enough, your business skills are honed by the education you received; being aware of the ways through which your education influenced you business mindset and your business opportunities will help you better evaluate your situation and correct your flaws. First, the quality of your degree has an immediate impact on the quality of the job opportunities that you can expect to receive and on the power of your social network. Indeed, a degree from a poorly recognized business school will open few doors, whereas one from Harvard Business School will almost surely be the door open to a bright career. You might be thinking that you are doomed by the popularity of your degree: you are not and you have alternatives.
One of them is to try and get a better degree, even if that means taking another Bachelor or another Master. This will be a chance for you to work through all the business concepts once again, deepen your knowledge and get the precious degree that will offer you the business opportunities that you are looking for. But taking another degree isn't the sole possibility to remedy a poorly recognized education: you could also shift your activities towards sectors that don't require you to hold a high academic recognition, such as ... entrepreneurship. True, an entrepreneur from a recognized business school will have an additional quality stamp in order to find investors (lendors and shareholders), but at the end of the day the key success factor will be the viability of his project. Why do you believe are there so many business owners among US immigrants ? Because they didn't enjoy the benefits of a top-notch degree and turned to entrepreneurship in order to find social recognition.
Beyond the quality stamp, a degree from a recognized business school also allows you to interact with brilliant people and exchange ideas with them, which is in my opinion one of the most important aspects of business education. Once again, if you consider that your degree isn't that great, you might want to bridge the gap by looking to network with business-minded people, by reading blogs or business news, by taking part in entrepreneurship circles, etc ...
The value added that can be found in a renowned business school can be reconstituted outside of a business school, which I tried to prove in the above lines. However, no matter how brilliant your business school was, you need to keep a certain distance to the business concepts that were thrown at your face: what were your ideas and preferences before you followed that business degree ? In which ways did these ideas involve ? Are the new concepts that you are defending now really more informed, more profitable and more socially responsible than those you were supporting before ? The point here is that you need to keep a critical mindset. Too often, too much complexity leads you to failure and you must steer away from opaque or unsubstantiated ideas. Refuse the fluff. Remain practical.
