I just graduated from my MBA at 27 and I think that is too young.
I just graduated from my MBA and I’m 27. I have another Master in Psychology and 4 years of full-time work experience (not counting internships and side jobs when in university).
I thought I was gonna be a superstar for collecting all those degrees so young. It turns out trying to compress degrees in a short professional life spam simply did not pay off.
To be clear: I never had any intentions of doing a Ph.D. and following an academic life. My goal has always been to work in corporate.
Still, I believed that academic accomplishments could compensate from fewer years of work experience so that I would have the same salary as my MBA peers who are on average 4 years older than me.
Boy, was I wrong. Experience is more important than degrees, and I am now paying a high price (financially and emotionally speaking) for having deluded myself for so long.
It’s important to say that I loved doing all my studies: my bachelor in international politics, my first master's in psychology, and now my MBA. I have learned so much, I got to know incredible people and my mind expanded greatly.
However, I also experienced 2 very negative effects of trying to take a shortcut by adding diplomas to my CV without the according to experience to back them up:
1) Not being able to pay my high investments
Let’s face it: education is crazy-expensive. Especially an MBA. We are talking about tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees (or even hundreds of thousands), not to mention living costs for 1 or 2 years and the loss of income during that period.
Doing an MBA so young means that my post-MBA salary will not be enough to repay this investment so early. And that is very scary.
It turns out that MBAs are designed for people who already have saved enough with their earnings to be able to afford the fees. I thought that by getting a loan to do it, it would be ok because it would quickly repay itself.
I forgot to consider that I would not be able to get to the salary levels the MBA website advertised due to my lack of experience.
2) Feeling bad when comparing post MBA salaries and job titles with my peers
Comparison sucks. And yet, we can’t help it.
Now that the MBA is done, I cannot help but compare the salary level some classmates are aiming for and what I am seeing as viable to me. It is hard to remember, at this time, that I have around 4 years less of work experience and that is ok for me to accept a lower salary than my peers.
But, still, every time I hear one of them saying “Oh, I would never consider a pay less than 80k a year” while I am going in the lower 60 s, it hurts and makes me feel bad. Even worse, it makes me feel ashamed.
Furthermore, when talking about job titles, the situation might be even worse. I am applying for entry-level jobs such as trainees (because for all the more senior ones they require a minimum of 5-year work experience) while my peers are all going for management roles with fancy titles.
I know it shouldn’t bother me, but it does. I feel like a kid.
And, on some level, I actually am. While 4 years might not seem a lot when you are an adult, in this case it is.
Maybe to find a partner it doesn't matter if you have a 4-year age difference. But 4 years in terms of work experience, especially during the first 10 years of your career, is a hell of a lot of time.
It changes everything whether you have worked for 4 or for 8 years before doing an MBA.
I thought doing an MBA younger would make me feel empowered, but it had the opposite effect. I thought it would make me go ¨ahead¨, but I was wrong.
You cannot compensate for work experience you didn´t have just by adding a degree. Experience, in the end, counts much more than education.
That is a hard lesson learned for me.
So, if you are considering doing an MBA without a good 6 years of full-time experience (which means starting at about 28, the average age), my advice is to wait a bit longer.
Gather more practice, more insights, different roles or industries. Trust me, it will make your degree (a huge investment by the way) better. You will profit more from each class because you will be more able to relate the classroom learning to your previous experience. And that, in my opinion, is the biggest value proposition of doing an expensive MBA instead of a regular Master's degree (I did both).
In the end, it is about having a balance between your academic achievements and your practical work experience. They need to be coherent.
That is the sweet spot I missed. Now, enough certificates for me. It is time to go get myself a job, get my hands dirty, and never ever again engage in salary conversations with my classmates.
