Bloomberg’s Best Undergrad Business Schools & Employment Trends

Bloomberg partners with Cambria for its annual survey to rank the Best Undergraduate Business Schools. We collaborate with Bloomberg around survey design, administer the survey, and identify current recruiting issues and trends.

The latest rankings are out and – among the findings is this data point: More than half of the students who have jobs lined up for when they graduate were interns at the companies where they’re going to work fulltime. That points to the value of internships, if you’re looking to snag the best graduates from business school.

Bloomberg also partners with Cambria for its annual MBA rankings. Additional data from the 2015 MBA survey is published on a rolling basis. We collaborated with Businessweek to redesign the survey to look at the critical skills needed by employers – you can find a good summary here. –

The skills identified as most important – leadership, strategic thinking, and creative problem solving skills – are mostly acquired over time through on-the-job experience rather than formal learning. This highlights the need for organizations to provide employees with the right experiences to build those capabilities.

Not all experiences, however, are created equal. Some experiences can give people needed familiarity with roles and functions other than their own, and these are important for rounding out an employee’s resume; other experiences provide a greater degree of “stretch”. Every organization has what we might call “pivotal” assignments, precisely because they are known to develop skills like those noted above. And other experiences can be designed to challenge people in a way that requires these skills.

Maximum development takes place when employees understand the benefits of each experience and what the key learning opportunities are. That way, assignments can take on a greater meaning, engage employees more in their understanding of the reasons for these experiences, and show how they will help them master the skills needed to move on to more demanding roles.