Life-Long Career Development

Adrien Smith, an American from Los Angeles, California, and a MBA participant gives his first impression.

"We were given our first insight into the services offered by the Careers Centre in a presentation by one of EDHEC's careers advisors.

We learned how time would be specifically devoted to career development each week, either in personal careers coaching, recruitment events, interview training. We were told how we would be interacting with different personal coaches who reflect experience from a wide array of industries and specialty roles and who serve as careers advisors. Throughout the year, each student will work with her/his career advisor to be coached in order to best prepare them for their professional future during one-on-one sessions.

We have already started preparing these one-on-one meetings by completing a career survey to best analyse our interests and passions.  Following the results of this evaluation we will be able to best manoeuvre our strengths and interests towards a career path for our future. "

Sandra Richez, Careers Advisor explains further

"Contrary to popular opinion, many students entering business school do not have a specific and clearly defined career objective. The EDHEC MBA encourages participants to broaden their horizons and explore possibilities.  Their exploration will be more effective and focused, however, if they take time for career self-assessment as early as possible. No two students entering our MBA program are exactly alike and our MBA participants have pursued a wide variety of business careers.  The question is not what are the best MBA jobs; but rather, what is the best business career for you? 

To help you with this all-important first step of business career self-assessment, our office has made available CareerLeader, the premier on-line business career self-assessment program. CareerLeader, developed after twelve years of research by Harvard Business School , is used by over 200 of the top MBA schools in the United States and Europe . 

This programme 

·        Provides expert assessments of students' unique pattern of business relevant interests, values and abilities.

·        Provides a personalised report of students' profiles, recommending specific business career paths to investigate, and showing how well, and in what ways, they match up with that career

·        Teaches students how to integrate and use the information they have gathered about themselves.

·        Provides them with in-depth views into 27 business careers, including information about the interests, rewards and abilities associated with each one.

·        Evaluates their entrepreneurial attributes

·        Teaches you how to analyse corporate cultures and recommend which organisational cultures are likely to be best for them

·        Gives students an insight into what are likely to be their Achilles' Heels.

Individual coaching meetings allow students and advisors to prepare a personal action plan, target companies and learn about EDHEC's networking possibilities." concludes Sandra Richez.

Adrien continues, " In addition to the career advisors, we are exposed to the alumni services and we have access as life long members.  Not only are there over 18,000 alumni to work with within the network, the graduates reside all over the world!  This type of network is essential for graduating MBA students and is an advantage that the business school offers.  In addition to using the alumni network for professional reasons, the network can also be accessed to find out about activities which take place throughout the year. I was impressed to hear that EDHEC's Alumni Association is 2nd in the world in the Potential to Network" category.* This will be very useful for our job search.

Finally we were informed about the online CV Book presenting all the MBA participants' profiles which is available for employer reference throughout the year the various job fairs that have been scheduled in Paris, Nice and Lille.

Overall, EDHEC Business School seems to be very aware that MBA students need these types to tools to help us to reach our goals and aspirations.  Having these types of services at EDHEC Business School, was definitely part of the reason as to why I was attracted to this MBA programme in particular."

* The Economist Intelligence Unit:  Worldwide ranking of full-time MBA programmes in the category "Potential to Network" (The Economist, 29th September)