When evaluating your application, our MBA Admissions Committee aims for a complete picture of your qualifications and fit with the program. It’s all about perspective. We look at your application as if we are holding a scale, balancing all the parts.
When considering the specific experience on your resume, on one side there’s a raw number of years (Quantity), and on the other is your job experience (Quality). To help you showcase your experience in the best possible light, below are a few key factors we are considering when reviewing your resume.
Quantity
Say that you are the CEO of a mid-size corporation. Wonderful! Oh, you just started in this position? That’s an amazing accomplishment, but perhaps you’d still admit that your knowledge and expertise in such a new position wouldn’t be as developed as someone who’s been doing it for a few years.
Or maybe you have been in the same job for 10 years. Wow! No doubt you are a go-to person when it comes to that role, but could it mean that perhaps you didn’t take as much initiative or demonstrate the leadership qualities required to launch you to the next level? Or perhaps you have only had a project manager role for a year, but in that time you’ve produced measurable results and demonstrated leadership. In these cases, the quality of your work experience matters more.
We acknowledge that there is much more to your work experience than the simple number of months/years you have been working, however, we want to ensure students in our programs have a minimum of work experience in order to get the full benefit of their MBA experience. This is in the best interest of all of our students, including you. You can only get one MBA, and you will get much more out of the experience with a few years of real-world, hands-on work experience under your belt. Additionally, it makes for a better student environment overall. You will be able to contribute more to class discussions based on your own experiences, and you will benefit from learning from other classmate’s experiences in other industries.
Quality
A general job title like “Project Manager” may seem lackluster, but could actually be pretty exciting. Don’t let us make assumptions. Take every opportunity on your application to illustrate just WHAT about your job made your experience rich and rewarding.
On the flip side, a Chief Operating Officer title sounds impressive, but what kind of company did you work for and how extensive were your duties? An impressive title with naught to back it up won’t move the needle in your favor when it comes to work experience.
Our Admissions Committee knows to look beyond mere job titles to understand the quality of your work contribution. Sometimes a flashy and important-sounding job title is used to attract candidates to mundane jobs. Other times, if you scratch the surface beyond a seemingly lackluster job title, you will find that the role is challenging and critical to the success of an organization. We’re trained to look beyond the headlines of your resume and look at the contributions you’ve made in each of your roles. Utilize the bullet points under each job entry to illustrate what made your experience rich and rewarding.
Progression
Striking a balance between quality and quantity is the progression of your work experience. Consider two hypothetical applicants:
Applicant A has 3 years of work experience. She’s worked for the same company throughout her career. Her first 2 years were spent in a rotational program where she was exposed to all aspects of the business. After the rotational program, she took a position on the operations team, and she was recently promoted to a team lead role where she will be managing a few direct reports.
Applicant B has 10 years of work experience. He’s been in similar software development roles for 3-4 years each at three different companies. There are only minor differences in his responsibilities in each role, and he’s never led a project or team.
Despite having less work experience overall, Applicant A is clearly on the more promising career path. That’s not to say Applicant B will go straight to the deny bin. He may be a subject matter expert in what he does, and he may be able to provide a unique perspective comparing and contrasting the various companies for which he’s worked, but he will need to explain elsewhere in his application why his career progress has stagnated.
Resume Writing Tips
The takeaway on work experience: Years, titles, and accomplishments are not, by themselves deciding factors. To help you provide us with a clear picture, here are our top tips for showcasing your work experience on your resume:
Tailor Content – A resume should be a concise summary of your relevant experience, not an exhaustive list of everything you’ve done since high school. Don’t attempt to inflate your resume by padding it with material that doesn’t add value. Summarize where you can. For example, those three food-service jobs you had during college can be combined in a single line. You can also cut any skills that are common among all applicants like using Microsoft Office, and leave off skills that can’t be verified by the Admissions Committee like describing yourself as a hard worker or quick learner. Avoid jargon that is specific to your industry that our Admissions Committee members may not know. Also, there’s no need for an objective statement. We know your goal is to earn an MBA and we’ll ask about your career goals in other parts of the application.
Emphasize Results – We want to see how much you individually contributed in your role. Whenever possible, explain how you personally added to a team goal. Highlight your key achievements, not just the tasks that you preform. If the person replacing you when you leave your role could copy and paste your bullet points into their resume, that’s probably a sign you need to better emphasize your personal accomplishments.
Avoid Redundancy – Think of each line on your resume as a valuable piece of real estate. Each line should tell us something new. If you have performed the same task in multiple roles, it’s not necessary to list that same task more than once on your resume. Further, consider what underlying message each bullet point is conveying. You don’t need four different lines detailing exactly by how much you exceeded your sales goal in each of the last 4 quarters, plus another line saying that you won the Top Salesperson of the Year award. We can get the message that you are good at sales in half that space.
Show Balance – Past performance is a strong indicator of future performance. If you can show that you have previously excelled in the classroom or workplace while participating in other community or volunteer activities, then we will have confidence you can do it again in our program. An “Additional” section is a great place to detail your activities and interests outside of work and school. Feel free to share anything else you would like us to know like hobbies or a fun fact for a potential conversation starter.
Utilize White Space – Great resume content can only be great if a reader can easily access it. That’s where resume readability comes into play. Don’t forget to use your white space effectively. A resume is not about cramming as much as you can onto the page. Rather, give your content some space to breathe.
Enlist Proofreaders– We’re all human and have made grammar, punctuation, or formatting errors before, but doing so on a resume makes you look sloppy and like you’re not taking the application process seriously. We want to see a polished final product. Have a trusted and knowledgeable friend proofread your resume to catch the mistakes that your eyes glaze over after re-reading it for the millionth time, and don’t trust spellcheck to do the job for you.
Convey Personal Brand – Your resume can be unique to you. Especially if you work in a creative industry or position, it’s ok to use your resume’s style to differentiate yourself. Just don’t go too wild to the point where it distracts from your content. Have a peer give your resume a 30-second review and see if the impression you want to pop for a reader, actually does.
Remember, your resume is an important tool for us to get to know you, but it’s not the only thing we use to learn about your work experience. Your letter of recommendation also gives us a sense of you as a colleague and teammate from someone else’s point of view. We’ll learn about your career goals and how you plan to achieve them in your cover letter. Focus your resume on showcasing the quantity, quality, and progression of your work experience so far.
If you have any questions during the application process, we’re here to help. Please visit our website for details on applying to each program and follow us on Instagram for an inside look into the Texas McCombs MBA.
Good luck and Hook ’em!
