Avoid Middle Management Career Stagnation – Start Your MBA

For many professionals, the early years of our careers are full of ambition, goals, achievements and excitement. However, once you reach a point where you are earning a good salary and are respected in your role, you may find there is less of that initial excitement that comes with the more rapid advancement you see in the first ten years or so after entering your chosen field. It is usually once a professional reaches middle management that this sets in, as the jump from this point to senior management is a bigger gap than you have encountered before, with less obvious career progression and fewer of those ‘top jobs’ available.

Avoid Middle Management Career Stagnation – Start Your MBA
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Middle Management Malaise?

For some people, this tends to lead to changing between companies or projects when a new challenge is required or they’d like to earn more, however many people tend to stay at around the same level, perhaps picking up a slightly more high profile job or a bigger department, but never really making that leap from middle management to senior executive, director type roles.

Of course, life in middle management tends to be financially comfortable and it can be appealing to stay at that level for the rest of your career – you usually have a lot of expertise by this point, are respected by your peers, and also are likely to have more going on in your life outside of work than you perhaps did in your go-getter career phase in your twenties. However, if you are beginning to feel like you are stagnating at your current level and want to give yourself a better chance of breaking into the next level of the pyramid, there are things you can do – a popular one of which is to obtain an MBA.

Why Can an MBA Help You Progress Further?

An MBA is a fairly unique qualification in that it requires you to have a lot of professional experience outside of academia as well as a degree. This means it is very specifically designed for professionals who want to become business leaders. Some people take an MBA so they can learn how to run a successful business and start up on their own, but one of the main reasons people do it is to make themselves good prospects for senior management roles. As someone in middle management you no doubt have the minimum three years of professional world experience that is a prerequisite for an MBA with a good university like the University of Birmingham (The Sunday Times UK university of the year in 2014, which is also ranked by The Economist as having one of the best MBA programs), and will be able to perform very well on the course.

Universally recognised and respected, an MBA is one of the best CV assets you can have in most fields of business, and will demonstrate the skills needed to deal with higher level strategies and business scenarios than are required of department heads and other middle managers.

Avoid Middle Management Career Stagnation – Start Your MBA
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Do You Need to Take Time Out of Your Career to Study?

Another great thing about the fact that MBAs are designed with experienced professionals in mind is that they can be done while continuing to work. In some cases, your company may even sponsor you to do the MBA, and give you extra time off for exams and studying. You can also do a lot of the course online, meaning you can fit it around work. Another useful thing is that you can often fit your dissertation around a topic that is useful or relevant to your current business or employer, meaning you can begin making your MBA add value to your company before you even finish getting the qualification!

There are other benefits to undertaking an MBA too – it can be great for networking, it can teach you about areas that you may not naturally encounter in your current job (for instance, if you are head of IT, you may not have a natural need to be exposed to marketing strategy), and can equip you to view a business as a whole from a leadership position, rather than having the silo view you often get when your work is only concerned with one area of operations.

If you are thinking about the future and have realised you are not content to stay at your current level for the long term, then getting started on your MBA can help power you towards the next stage of your professional career.

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