You can’t get through an MBA application without being asked about your career goals and what you want to achieve as a future leader, but a lot of applicants struggle to answer the question convincingly.
This post is dedicated to helping you produce a strong MBA career goals essay. I’ll not only be talking about the keys to writing a convincing career goals essay, but also using my own career goals essay from my HBS application to illustrate my points.
Ultimately, a good career goals essay has five key qualities.
5 Features of a Good MBA Career Goals Essay
Your MBA goals essay should have these five main qualities:
| Characteristics of a Good MBA Goals Essay | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Clear | State your intended career path unambiguously and early in the essay. Avoid lengthy, poetic introductions and lead with a straightforward statement of your goals. Admissions committees must immediately understand your direction. |
| Specific | Provide details about your goals, striving for immediate specificity. Avoid generic or vague ambitions. Note: Schools don’t expect you to follow the exact plan for life, but they do want to know you’re not just using an MBA to “find yourself.” |
| Genuine | Your stated goals must align with your past actions and experiences. Demonstrate a logical career progression from your previous work to your future aspirations. Illustrate how your experiences support your long-term vision. One-off volunteering or infrequent travel do not support a lifelong ambition; deep, relevant engagement does. |
| Ambitious | Think big — admissions committees are seeking candidates who will achieve exceptional success, not just perform well. Don’t be afraid to set a bold, inspiring vision, as schools want to invest in candidates with high potential for meaningful impact. |
| Congruous | Show how the MBA program is the logical bridge between your current skills and your goals. Articulate what you still need to learn, and demonstrate an understanding of how the MBA (and the specific graduate school) will help you reach your objectives. Reference school specifics (courses, culture, alumni, programs) to prove you have carefully considered your fit. |
Be Clear
State your intended career path unambiguously and immediately. No one ever got admitted to business school for a beautifully written and captivating introduction, but plenty have gotten dinged because admissions committees couldn’t understand what exactly the applicant’s career goal was from their MBA essays.
My advice to applicants is always the same: lead your essay with a clear statement of your career goal. Here’s the first sentence of my HBS career vision essay:
My career will focus on launching and managing social ventures that can provide innovative private-sector solutions to public problems.
It’s straightforward, clear, and, most importantly, isn’t hiding amid paragraphs of clichéd prose and wannabe poetry.
The one ding I’d give myself is that, by itself, it’s a little broad, which is why it’s also important to quickly get very specific …
Be Specific
Most MBA applicants are a few years out of college. Most are highly successful, they’re frequently promoted, and yet they’re starting to get bored. They know they want to move on to the Next Big Thing, but they’re not sure what that is yet.
This creates a problem for business school admissions committees, which find themselves bombarded with hundreds of applicants every year who aren’t entirely sure what they want to do post-MBA. They only know that they don’t want to fall behind their fast-ascending peers.
Admissions committees don’t want to admit applicants who are attending business school as a stopgap while they figure out what to do next. They want students with specific long-term professional goals. So, it’s important to convey this specificity and confidence in your MBA career goals essay. There are four ways to do so:
- Function. You can talk about a specific function: brand manager, investment banker, operations manager …
- Industry. You can talk about a specific industry: renewable energy, government, commercial banking, management consulting …
- Geography. You can talk about a specific geographical focus: emerging markets, urban communities, your home state …
- Quantification. You can talk about a quantifiable goal: create 25,000 jobs, raise a $25 million fund, reduce the poverty rate in a country by 1% …
Here’s how, immediately after my first sentence, I got specific in my HBS post-MBA career goals essay:
After graduating from business school, I plan to launch a social venture dedicated to providing inner-city schools with journalism programs. The goal would not be to train new journalists for careers in a rapidly evaporating field. Instead it would be to teach students the broadly applicable skills that comprise good journalism: analyzing real-life issues, asking significant questions, and composing precise writings. These skills, which have been so important to my academic and professional success, can enable students inhibited by a stagnating education system.
After successfully growing this organization, I envision taking leadership roles in other established ventures and eventually managing a company, such as Google.org, that can offer new approaches to a variety of persistent economic and social problems.
It’s worth noting that I’ve gone on to do exactly none of that—and that’s OK! Instead, I joined a startup in Chicago and launched MBA Admissions Advisors. The HBS admissions committee isn’t hunting me down trying to hold me to the vision I laid out in my application; they aren’t threatening to revoke my degree.
Don’t get me wrong — I believed what I wrote at the time I wrote it, and it fit with my background and priorities. But things change, and admissions committees understand that. What they aren’t OK with is applicants using business school to figure out what they want to do with their lives. So be specific in your MBA goals essay, but also …
Be Genuine
After the financial crisis in 2008, business schools received a lot of criticism for the role they played propagating greed among graduates — pushing them toward high-paying jobs in investment banking and on Wall Street.
Whether the criticism was fair or unfair, MBA programs reacted by investing heavily in social enterprise classes, and MBA admissions officers began admitting more students with nonprofit and public sector backgrounds. Applicants quickly caught on, and many financial services and management consulting applicants began writing about career visions in social enterprise.
A lot of them got dinged.
Past actions are one of the best predictors of future actions. So if your career choices to date don’t support the post-MBA personal and professional goals you are professing in your essay, then you’re going to have problems. Your MBA career goals essay won’t seem genuine, and business schools have a seriously oversensitive bullshit detector.
So, as you think through your career goals, take a hard look at your career and life choices to date, and make sure those choices support your long-term vision. And for the record — simply volunteering a few hours once a month does not support a future career goal built on a lifetime in social enterprise. Nor does traveling a few times over the past few years support a career goal entailing a lifelong commitment to emerging markets.
I had the background leading up to business school to support my career vision in social enterprise. I’d spent nearly 5 years working first in politics and then in the White House, and I argued that I’d learned “government alone cannot support society. The private sector must be an agent of change, too.” This helped me connect the dots between what I had been doing in government and my motivation for attending business school.
So whether it’s returning to your family’s business, becoming a leader in corporate development, or working in international management, you need to highlight the ways in which your past experiences back up your career aspirations and long-term goals. And if they don’t, you need to think about why.
Be Ambitious
Sometimes it helps to think about MBA admissions committees a little bit like venture capital firms. They’re not necessarily looking to invest in hundreds of students who will all perform well; they’re looking to invest in hundreds of students, of whom only a handful will do exceptionally well, becoming the next Jaime Diamond (HBS ’82), Michael Bloomberg (HBS ’66), or Phil Knight (Stanford ’62). Big names breed big publicity, and that’s good for business schools.
So dream big, and be confident that you can achieve your vision. Instead of simply saying you want to “work in business development” or “earn a position at a private equity firm,” think about your ultimate goal and dream position—whether that’s leading a global company, launching your own startup, or driving innovation in an industry you’re passionate about.
Business schools want you to sell them on your potential in your MBA career goals essay, since ultimately that’s the investment they are making in you.
Be Congruous
You’re applying to a Master of Business Administration graduate program, so be coherent about how an MBA fits in with your larger career vision. It should be the bridge between the skills you have now and the skills you need to achieve your goals — skills you can only gain as an MBA student.
Here’s how I connected my professional experience to my post-MBA goals:
To achieve this vision, I need to expand on my success in the public sector. On the President campaign, I gained experience managing fundraising events, working with business leaders and high-dollar donors, and effecting change at a grassroots level. In the White House, I’ve gained experience developing and implementing large-scale public policies. Business school will help me achieve my career vision by exposing me to students and faculty with diverse private sector work experience. It will exercise my leadership abilities and provide me a business education that will prove critical to launching and managing successful social ventures.
Looking back, I’m not sure this is the most compelling paragraph I wrote in my essays, but it does accomplish two things. First, it reminds the committee of the choices I have made (and therefore emphasizes that my career vision is genuine). Second, it begins to fill in the gaps about why I still need business school.
It’s okay to acknowledge that you still have a lot to learn from your MBA education: managerial skills, communication skills, analytical skills … A strong career goals essay should should convince your target MBA program of your commitment to earning an MBA degree, and the likelihood you’ll accept an offer of admission should they extend one.
I continued along that line of thought (with a bit more specificity, thankfully!) in talking about why I needed Harvard in particular:
After conversations with current HBS students and faculty, it is clear that HBS promotes a culture that supports my career vision and will expose me to other students with diverse backgrounds but similar aspirations. In addition, HBS offers an academic and financial infrastructure to support social entrepreneurship for its students and its alumni, and programs like the Social Venture Track of the HBS Business Plan Contest will help develop my social venture idea.
This paragraph added a little more specificity than the one above, which is always critical. Schools don’t want to be your second choice, and they want to know that you’ve taken the decision to attend seriously enough to have checked out a few programs, clubs, classes, and even visited campus and a few admissions events.
Get Support
Writing a strong MBA career goals essay takes a lot of introspection. Furthermore, your career essay should address each of the five key characteristics discussed above (clarity, specificity, genuineness, ambition, and congruity).
But writing an impressive MBA goals essay inevitably also requires support from friends, family, and colleagues, who will be your best mentors in working through exactly what you want to do in your career. Even more valuable can be working with an MBA admissions consultant.