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Welcome to MBA Podcaster, the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Janet Nakano. Every MBA program has strengths in certain areas. Some schools have a renowned finance faculty like Wharton and Chicago GSB. Other schools are known for entrepreneurship or general management. By exploring a school’s MBA concentrations you’ll get a sense of a program’s strengths and can then determine if it’s aligned with your future goals. In part I and II of our series on MBA tracks we explored eight different fields, some of which included real estate and technology. We continue the series with part III. This time we explore MBA specialties in human resource management, accounting, operations management and supply chains. Our guests include professors and directors of top rank programs in these fields. If you missed part I or II of our series, visit our website mbapodcaster.com.

Employees are the most important assets to any business. That’s why how human resources are managed often contributes to the success or failure of an organization. The Krannert School of Management of Purdue University offers a Masters in Human Resource Management as well as a MBA with a concentration in HR. Chuck Johnson is Director of Professional Masters Programs, “Human Resource Managers have a story history in things like personnel administration and payroll and hiring and benefits and things like that. While many of those functions today are still part of what we might consider the human resource management, even more so today they’re involved in redevelopment of the workforce, the attraction of new talent, the retention of existing talent and helping the organization to sometimes make the talent or develop in a way that will be most effective. That involves things such as systems for rewards and systems to help the organization become better, more nimble. Often times it involves things like performance evaluation and performance management systems. Helping managers become more effective at managing their employees and a wide range of different activities.”

At Krannert, Johnson in HR and the masters in HR are fairly similar. However, he says the MBA gives students more of an overview of human resource management rather than going in-depth, “It does give you I think a good appreciation and perhaps good preparation for HR. Whereas in our MSHRN for example the students do a slightly smaller version of the MBA core curriculum but they still get accounting and finance and marketing and operations and things like that but they get a little bit more coursework in human resource management as part of their required curriculum. So that’s probably the main difference between our MBA program and our MSHRN program. From across the country standpoint you probably see a wide range. You probably see some schools where the degree came out let’s say an industrial and labor relations school and it might be much more pure industrial labor relations, human resources and less about necessarily about the accounting, finance, marketing and business side of things. Some programs you’re going to see perhaps a little bit more business, it kind of depends. I think when you look at degrees that are MS in human resource management you might see more of the business background. If you look at and this is not an absolute but this kind of a tennis look at are they MS human resource management or are they masters in industrial labor relations, what’s the history behind it that might drive the content of extent.”

Deciding between a MBA or a MS in HR depends on your past experience and where you want to go says Johnson, “In my experience if a person has little background in human resource management and they have a desire to move into that direction as far as a career path whether it’s human resource management or consulting or to move into a specific functional area within HR. The less background they have in HR the more I think a specialized degree in human resource management can be to their advantage. I think for a person who might come to a program with already having a HR background who may want to stay in HR but may also want to go into different areas, the more general management curriculum of the MBA with a little bit less focus on HR probably would serve them better. The MSHRN and the MBA in HR both students are recruited along side one another. I think again depending on the person’s background, if the person has no background in HR and they’re doing the MBA with an HR concentration they may not be perceived as strong as perhaps the person who has the MSHRN. But if the person has prior HR background, they’re not coming from financial, they’re not coming from marketing or something but they worked in HR then the MBA with a HRN concentration can be very appealing.” Human resource management is a growing field in need of qualified professionals. Johnson says having the formal training of a MBA or masters will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Globalization has also affected HR management, Johnson says this is an area just beginning to open up, “Organizations, especially those that have very strong HR cultures if you will, are looking for ways to be able to manage very culturally and geographically diverse populations of employees and those are in HR practices across the globe really and that’s kind of an interesting and fascinating area for HR.” Success of an organization is often based on HR practices says Johnson. Take for example, mergers and acquisitions, “A lot of times in business school we teach how to value an organization for a merger or acquisition. We give them a lot of the tools to be able to make the deals happen but where business really succeeds or fails is what happens after that merger. In a lot of cases it’s how do we integrate the people? How do we make sure that the processes that we have in place are going to work? I’m working with a company right now through executive education area and their challenge is how do we retain some of our best talent in a time of uncertainty, it’s a real key challenge. Even when you’ve been very loyal to the organization and very happy in the organization as things are changing how do we as a company reassure you that you’re still going to be valued the same way or the things that attract you to this firm or this industry are going to stay there. HR is a huge part of that and without that key talent staying, many times the value in the merger or the acquisition goes out the window. So it’s not just about putting the numbers on the spreadsheet, it’s also about how do we drive it and make it really happen in reality.”

It’s not uncommon for those with an accounting background to pursue a MBA, but those without prior experience have the option at many business schools to concentrate or specialize in accounting. Eric Hirst is a professor of accounting and an Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin, “MBAs at the University of Texas typically will not concentrate only in accounting. What they’ll do is they’ll take a lot of accounting to supplement, typically a finance concentration or a finance specialization. We also have folks who want to be consultants and they will also realize the value of having a very, very solid background in accounting. So the kinds of careers that most of our students who specialize or take more than the average amount of accounting, they’re going to go into either corporate finance, investment banking or consulting. Those are the three main areas they’ll go into. We have a master of professional accounting program so that’s where people typically become CPAs. In the MBA program what happens is we have people who come in and they may or may not be CPAs already but they want to really solidify their accounting knowledge while they pursue other careers or other tracks so that accounting is a means to an end, not the end itself.” Hirst says MBAs who specialize in accounting will work in companies like Goldman Sacks, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. These are the same jobs that finance students are trying to get. He says but, “You can distinguish yourself from that big pool by having that solid understanding of accounting along with the finance. If you’re going to be a high quality finance practitioner you need to understand really, really well where your data are coming from. And if you’re going to be a high quality consultant you’re going to need to understand how risk is measured, how risk is controlled, how strategies can be implemented, need to have high quality information feeding the decision maker and this is really what accounting is all about. It’s about reporting on what’s been happening, on indications of where we’re going, both setting up information systems as control systems that allow managers to feed decision makers and track whether decision makers, managers, leaders are on track or not.”

Hirst says when considering MBA programs with an accounting concentration look for schools that are strong in finance, “More and more accounting is based on what we call fair values and fair values come out of valuation models. Sometimes they come out of market prices but there are an awful lot of assets, liabilities, these are the sort of the core of what accountants measure assets and liabilities, that require measurement using much more sophisticated models. In other words it’s not a question of look up an invoice anymore, it’s a question of saying we’ve got goodwill on the balance sheet is that goodwill over valued or not? It has to run through an impairment test, to do that impairment test you need to value some subset of a business. This is the domain of economics and finance. Increasingly those domains are spilling over into accounting and so the best accountants are the ones who really have a very solid understanding of economics and finance as well.”

Lesley Kromer is Associate Director of the Career Opportunities Center at the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Melon University. Tepper was ranked number two by US News World and Report for its operations and production specialty. Kromer says operation management is how you allow goods and services to be produced, “So you may be looking at a situation where you need to produce a tangible good and you have an entire operations network set up in order to enable that. You may also be involved in producing a certain service or delivering a given service and so operations management is a function and helps you determine how you’re going to actually set up and deliver that service.” Kromer says MBAs with an operations concentration generally go in two directions. “The one path is pursuing a career in operations consulting. There are a number of consulting firms that either specialize in operations consulting or have branches of their firm that focus on it. So that’s one area. The other area of course we see individuals going into the more traditional production and operations management so they may be responsible for a network of facilities, they may be responsible for a section of that company supply chain, interacting with suppliers or interacting with actual transformation of raw materials and services into the finished product or they may also be involved in the distribution and the logistics piece of it in order to get the finished goods into their customers hands.”

Those interested in more traditional operation management roles tend to have an operations background says Kromer. But those going into consulting don’t often have prior experience. She says MBAs with an operations concentration can work for consulting firms that have an operations group, “So sometimes you’ll have an individual that says that’s where I really want to focus my attention on so I’m going to specify that I’m interested in working in this functional group within this consulting firm and that group focuses on operations type problems. Other firms, say ATK (AT Kearney), have a fairly operations focus to a lot of the work they do and so individuals might say I’m going to choose to pursue a career with ATK, with AT Kearney, because I know I’m very interested in operations type problems and I know that they do a variety of work but they also have quite a substantial amount of their bookings are associated with operations related work. Other individuals choose to say I’m just going into general management consulting but if there’s a specific group that focuses more on operations issues over time I may want to gravitate toward that.”

People who are comfortable with others from various backgrounds tend to do well in operations management says Kromer. She says you should also be quantitative adept and be someone who enjoys seeing tangible results. The field of operations management is currently undergoing some change that’s why recently it hasn’t been that popular, “Operations has been a tough choice for people over the last few years because you’ve had quite a migration of manufacturing and operations activities outside of the United States. But on the flip side I think that’s presented all sorts of opportunities in that many companies are now recognizing they really need to set up their business in a global fashion. They’re looking at a supply chain that has increased significantly. They may have suppliers in parts of Asia and they’ve never dealt with the issues associated with getting goods whether it’s finished goods or whether it’s components, subassemblies, whatever and transporting them thousands of miles in order to meet their customer demand on a very, very consistent basis. So there are all sorts of very interesting challenges that have come about as supply chains lengthen as companies really look at their operations from a global perspective as opposed to just an individual country or even regional perspective.”

Supply chain management is a subdivision of operations management. It’s the process of acquisition of raw materials through to the transformation into a desired good. Dwight Smith-Daniels is Faculty Director of the Supply Chain Management Concentration at the Carey School of Business of Arizona State University. He says Dell Computers is an example of a company good at managing their supply chain. “Dell is not alone, they just happen to be the one that is most obvious because of the notion of I order a computer over the internet from their webpage yet I have it on my doorstep a week later and nothing really happens until I place my order. I mean you don’t have weeks and weeks to wait for somebody to make a chip, and then weeks and weeks to wait for somebody to assemble a computer. It all has to happen very rapidly. And so we’re seeing the pressure to do that of course in many manufacturer organizations but we also want to see it in services. Our expectations have increased with the improvements in information systems.” Carey was ranked number three in the nation for its supply chain specialty by US News and World Report. The business school also offers undergraduate degrees in supply chain management. Smith-Daniels says undergraduates however end up in different functional areas, “We tend to see the undergraduate major is hired into basically into positions such as buyers and they’re purchasing particular items from suppliers and we see them moving for instance into scheduling positions in manufacturing and distribution. We see the MBA graduates really two different components of what these people are asked to do is typically they’re asked to manage people that are involved in engaging in various activities in the supply chain such as buyers but they’re also asked to manage entire commodities and entire ranges of commodities. Also we see our MBAs being hired because supply chain management is still in its infancy as a field and really being asked to change what’s happening in organizations in the supply chains. That can involve such things as new processes, new systems, they’re also responsible in many cases for managing change projects within the supply chain and improving that organizations supply chain.”

Smith-Daniels says if you’re interested in supply chains, nowadays you’ll have to be able to work internationally as a lot of business is done abroad. And he says there are many opportunities for MBAs in this field in a wide range of industries. “Most recently we’ve seen over about a third of our graduates move into service organizations, healthcare, financial services; we’ve had a number of graduates working in for instance in financial services in both banks and insurance companies because of the necessity of purchasing services. To give you an example I’m doing some work in managing supply chain projects for an aerospace company and they’ve outsourced a good source of their financial service activities, a good portion of their accounting activities to overseas organizations and so they’re looking to supply chain managers to manage those suppliers. So there’s a greater and greater portion of services that are outsourced and MBAs that are called upon, our graduates are called upon to manage these people. Traditional positions in supply chains in manufacturing organizations in the high tech sector including semiconductors, telecommunications, aerospace manufacturing, automobiles, other hard manufacturing and certainly in consumer products a lot of them still working in consumer products. I can’t target any specific industry and say that’s a specific industry that’s hiring.

For information and advice and to register for your weekly MBA podcast visit mbapodcaster.com. I’m Janet Nakano and this MBA Podcaster. Thanks for joining us and listen next time for another topic to help you succeed in your MBA application process and life beyond.