As a military leader, you have a jump on the competition: you know leadership, you understand responsibility, and you are goal-oriented. The MBA balances these skills with practical information, critical-thinking skills, and focus on solution implementation. In short, the experience you’ve gained in the military and the MBA enhance one another to put you ahead of your competitors, whether in a military or a civilian career. So, how does military experience really fit with the curriculum of a graduate management program and the business world at large?
Military experience traditionally provides excellent groundwork in leadership, flexibility and managing individuals and teams. It also teaches goal achievement, often under extreme circumstances. The flexibility that military experience provides enables you to think more broadly than the analysis alone suggests, resulting in better decisions. The orientation toward achieving a goal that is a requisite of military service better prepares you to affect that strategy and create a successful business or military outcome.
When you’re in graduate business school, this kind of experience makes your input invaluable to your classmates. Most MBA students can draw from work experience, but your military career may have taken you to foreign countries, placed you in different cultures, and required a level of adaptation and high-stakes decision-making that can’t be duplicated in the civilian world. Your perspective and skills will be important while you’re in school, and they will be actively sought by corporate recruiters.
If your career goal is military advancement, the MBA will help you achieve it. Graduate management education can help you hone the skills you bring from the classroom. Analytical and critical thinking skills will be particularly valuable as you manage larger and more complex operations, whether they involve areas such as supply chain management, finance, or more general operations and personnel functions. The MBA curriculum provides analytical training, specific business skill sets (such as finance, marketing, operations management), and industry-specific information. It offers all the basics you need to operate successfully in a management environment, in uniform or out.
Solving problems is part of the graduate management curriculum. An MBA program teaches you to analyze situations and suggest actions based on that analysis. The business skills you build help you to understand the setting in which you are functioning, and your background in military team management can help you better implement a given set of actions and coordinate the work of others.
You can see that the combination of military experience and a graduate management degree is almost perfect for meeting the demands of either a civilian or military setting. According to one MBA graduate with a background in naval explosive ordinance disposal, “In the military, we prioritize based on threat level. In the business world, things are more subtle. One prioritizes based on profit and loss. I’ve gained a new perspective.”