Friday | 9 January, 2009
Should You Get an MBA?
The pressure is on IT leaders to prove their business savvy, and job postings are asking for an MBA. Do you really need one to make it as a CIO? We asked two IT executives for help assembling arguments for and against pursuing the degree
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MacKay earned his master's degree in two and a half years from a regionally accredited online MBA program about 12 years ago while working for the College of William and Mary as its IT director. He decided to pursue his MBA because he realized he needed to know more about business to do his job effectively.
"I was in charge of all systems that tracked fund-raising for the endowment office, which had a strong marketing and sales orientation," says MacKay. "I started to realize that having a more sophisticated understanding of the business would greatly lend itself to my ability to use IT to make strategic differences in the way the fund-raising office operated."
Though he's not anti-MBA, Clark, like many IT professionals, isn't seized by a strong inclination to get the degree, though he has considered it. Yet at the same time, he's concerned that not having one will be a strike against him in a future job search.
"If having an MBA is not going to be a pre-screening criteria, I wouldn't think it would be necessary that I have one, but it does seem to be more and more part of the screening process," he says. "If the determining factor in my career and where I go from here is whether or not I have a business degree, then that will be something I have to make time for."
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