Latest / Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast / Episode 471: How Do You Stay Competitive When Everyone’s Qualified? The MBA Advantage in 2026

Transcript

Episode 471: How Do You Stay Competitive When Everyone’s Qualified? The MBA Advantage in 2026 · Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast

• 0:16
  Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. I'm your host, Graham Richmond, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about a moment that many successful young professionals eventually reach when early career momentum starts to level off and the question becomes how to break through to the next stage of leadership and impact. For many, that inflection point is where an MBA can play a powerful role, not just by adding technical skills, but by reshaping how people think, lead, and apply their experience in more complex business settings. To explore how MBA programs help students to make that leap, I'm pleased to be joined today by Keith Niedermeyer from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Let me give a quick bio on Keith before we bring him out onto the show. Keith is a clinical professor of marketing at the Kelley School of Business where he teaches in the MBA program and plays an active role in experiential and applied learning initiatives. Prior to Kelly, Keith spent over 15 years teaching marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and has a long list of publications and teaching awards to his name. At Indiana Kelley, Keith focuses on helping MBA students bridge theory and practice, with particular emphasis on data driven decision making, business analytics, and real world problem solving. Before joining academia, he spent some time in industry, bringing a practitioner's perspect into the classroom and into program design. I'm really excited to have him on the show to share his perspective on how MBA programs, and the Kelley MBA in particular, are thinking about curriculum skills development and preparing students for what comes next. So, Keith, welcome to the show. It's really great to have you with us.
• 1:52
  Speaker B: Thanks, Graham. I appreciate being on the show and.
• 1:54
  Speaker A: I think this is, I mean, this could not be a more kind of timely conversation because we hear so much about sort of the changing workplace and the need for MBA grads to have these new sets of skills. So let's get into it. I wanted to start with something that many of our listeners can probably relate to, and that is that, you know, some people are doing quite well in their careers, but they start to feel the limits of experience alone. And why do you think more people are coming to that realization right now? That that sense of kind of outgrowing a role.
• 2:24
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's a couple of, couple of junctures in which that typically happens to people. I think a lot of times early in folks careers, say three to five years out, they've been in a job a few years and they kind of ascended the learning curve and people start to feel stagnated. They're in that initial role or maybe only have made small advancements and they've learned a lot of things about that. They can execute very well, but they're seeking that growth and advancement. So they're really seeing like they're really thinking, how can I build beyond what I've learned and what I can execute day to day? I think alternatively, there's situations when people's the opposite is kind of when the responsibilities outgrow their training, that they advance relatively, relatively quickly and then they're asked to lead teams, they're asked to take on a lot more strategic responsibility and quite frankly, they don't feel ready for that. They don't feel like they have the background and the training to do that. And as we both know, just things are also moving very fast. So I think people are getting thrown into situations with technology and responsibilities and companies getting more lean and mean where again, they don't feel that they have the skill set to do that. And I think that's where MBAs can be a really deliberate step to build leadership and strategic skills needed for growth and advancement and frankly, just jump starting what's next for folks.
• 3:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, and you're absolutely, I mean, you're describing exactly what we hear a lot of from candidates who hang out@clearadmit.com, there's those two kind of scenarios. One is like, oh, I need to accelerate and I need something to kind of give me that jumpstart. But then equally there are also those folks that you just described who are sort of like, wow, I've been rising through the ranks and now I'm getting out of my depth. So yeah, both of these scenarios that raise the question about what comes next and you're suggesting that an MBA is a good next move. And so I wondered because some people I think will say, oh, I'm already successful, why do I need this mba? And I guess I want to ask you a little bit about how does leadership development help people to stand out and find their footing and maybe even a greater sense of fulfillment as their responsibilities grow?
• 4:35
  Speaker B: Sure. As you know, I think in MBA programs a lot of times you see people going into consulting, going into banking. The students I deal with a lot of the aspire and do go into brand management. And in those paths, I think in all three of those and others, as you move forward and you are successful, you move from execution to leadership and your job fundamentally changes. And again, as companies are getting more lean and mean, I think that that is an up or out situation. A lot of Times where you're not given a lot of opportunities to develop that skill set in the job, but then you're expected to all of a sudden go from executing on a team to leading a team, to moving a forward to thinking at these higher levels. So leadership development, you know, and MBAs are not just about the content knowledge. Content knowledge is important, but. And it's not just about getting the credential either. It's about leadership development. Building judgment, building confidence, building the ability to influence others, and skills that help professionals stand out and feel more fulfilled and impact their growth trajectory.
• 5:41
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I would argue that I feel like that kind of leadership growth, it's not happening always organically at work. And that's just thinking back to my own personal experiences in business school. There was so much about leadership. And it's funny, when you go into an MBA program that may not be top of mind, you're probably thinking, oh, I'm going to study corporate finance or marketing, et cetera. But some of these, what we're now calling, we don't call them soft skills anymore.
• 6:06
  Speaker B: Right.
• 6:06
  Speaker A: We call them, there's a new name and I'm totally blanking on it. But those types of skills are harder to develop in the workplace on the go, but very much a part of most of these mba. So yeah, I guess I kind of wondered maybe we can dive into that. Like how does the MBA experience help people to develop the kind of strategic thinking and leadership judgment that's harder to build at work?
• 6:29
  Speaker B: Yeah. As you just alluded to, building fundamental knowledge is still a big part of an MBA degree. I think our program and a lot of the top programs, you have really good teachers, you have really good professors teaching you cutting edge things and you take a core, you build these fundamental knowledge and all this space and bringing it together. But I think one of the big disconnects is this idea of the ability to do something. Tactics and execution versus higher level strategic thinking, understanding why we're doing something. In my classes, I like to call that the why behind what you're learning. And just a quick anecdote in that space. One of the things I do at Kelley is I direct the center for Brand Leadership and we have a board that has a lot of C level people on it, very high level director level people on it. And we had a roundtable discussion about what is lacking amongst their early career, mid career people. And to a person, the complaint that I heard was that they can do a lot of things right. They can come in and you can give people an Excel sheet, they can do pivot tables, they can extract all these things, but they can't really tell you what that means, what's going on, and what the firm should do about it. So again, as you mentioned in the intro, I'm a marketing guy. And so we talk about the who, what and the how. Right? Like figuring out not just what the data is saying, or extracting some sales insight or running some model, but figuring out what that means for who we're trying to serve. What is the value proposition we're trying to build. How are we going to position the firm for success? So this is really about creating intentional space for people to step out of that day to day execution and learn how to think more broadly, connect strategy to tactics, connect data, human skills, long term decision making in ways that a lot of roles just don't allow you that space to discover and build those skills when you're day to day trying to get stuff done.
• 8:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, and I feel like, you know, it's funny, we talk a lot on this show about applying to business school and the kind of act of, you know, writing essays and thinking about your career plan. And something that people always say is that they learn a lot about themselves as they're kind of journeying through the application process. But I would also argue that it even goes beyond that once you're in business school and that people spend a lot of time and I think are often surprised by how much they're learning about themselves. And so I guess I kind of wondered if, and I know you're on the front lines as faculty, but also as a leader in the MBA program. But I wondered, is there a moment or an example that stands out where a student realizes something new about their own leadership or decision making during the MBA journey? Are there moments in the curriculum that you see that happening a lot?
• 9:16
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I do think to build off what we were talking about, that good MBA programs create a structured and curated set of opportunities and experiences that help people through that discovery journey. And it happens in preterm, like at Kelly Here we have a program called ME Inc. That's preterm where you're really trying to discover yourself and your skills and what you're trying to get out of these things. And that happens in classes and in co curricular opportunities throughout. But to get to that one moment, there's a couple moments that really jump out to me. So there is an enormous amount. There's one word I can put on kind of the one to two year experience that people have in MBA program. It's transformation. People grow in ways that I don't think they think is possible. On the way in and from my perch, seeing these students cycle in and out, the transformation that happens, the growth that happens from year one to year two is just completely eye opening because people are coming in with four or five years of experience. They have an undergrad degree, many times an undergrad business degree, and they know a lot of stuff and they're capable at what they're doing. One of the programs I work in in Kelly's, the Consumer Marketing Academy. And that's a first year industry deep dive. And we have them in all the industries I work with, the consumer marketing and brand management type of people. And what we do in the first week of classes, we have the second years come back, they're fresh from their internships and they have a panel with the first years. And the first years are kind of wide eyed and looking at this stuff. And I've been with the second years the whole year before. So I've seen them grow, I've seen them go through this. And man, when they come back for that second year panel, they're just like different people. They're all grown up in my eyes in the sense that they've built all this content knowledge, they've run this gauntlet of experiences in the first year. They've gone and proven it at an internship and then they come back and the transformation's so amazing, the confidence with which they're speaking to these first years. And the first years are always overwhelmed at that point because they think, oh my gosh, these people are so accomplished, they know so much, how could I ever get there? But to me they're so close. It's like you're nine or ten months from that. And it's so amazing for me to see that huge transformation. And I'll give you one other instance, and this happens a bunch, but it happened at the Wharton School, which we were talking about. And it was early in my career. I was teaching consumer behavior to the MBAs at Wharton. And as you know, there's a lot of accomplished students there. And I had a student that was a former brand manager at a large FMG CPG company. And at the end of the class she kind of came up to me again, kind of wide eyed and said, you know, I was doing all this stuff for four years at this company, working on these brands, executing these things. Until I took this class, I didn't know why we did any of those things. And now I feel like I can be much more strategic, much more purposeful, and we can be successful and I can be successful on purpose. And I wanted to just repeat it all so I could write it down because that's exactly what we're trying to do. That's exactly what's supposed to happen in this MBA experience.
• 12:31
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think you're also making a bit of a pitch for this sort of two year format, which obviously most of the top programs in the United States are two years. And there really is something, I think, that happens when you go off and do that internship. You get to sort of have a little taste of putting into play the stuff you've learned in the first year and then you come back and you just have all that confidence. But one thing I want to talk about is how does being part of an MBA community contribute to leadership growth in ways that individual roles or companies? I mean, you know, we talked about that earlier. It's like you're kind of grinding along in your job and you've hit a ceiling. And we talked a lot about leadership development and I think, you know, there's so many examples within an MBA where this happens. But. Yeah, why is that the case? I mean. Yeah. What is happening in the MBA community that allows this to sort of be a feature?
• 13:18
  Speaker B: I think it's the breadth of opportunities and the diversity of opportunities that you get to deal with. Again, you know, most people at a job, you know, you're working on a team that can be a limited number of people or in a division or for a certain brand, or doing a certain thing in finance, and you're kind of in that zone. You're in industrials or wherever you are. But at an MBA program, you know, you have this kind of space and you're in, in a first year in most programs like ours, you. You're in a cohort doing your core classes, right? So you're diving into these experiences and being challenged with one group of people in a finance class. And then maybe in that afternoon you're doing it in ops, Right. And then you're doing it in data analytics. And so you're constantly being put in these positions with different teams and different people with different backgrounds from different industries and different geographies solving different problems. You're just not going to get that breadth of experience and all of the exposure to all those different viewpoints and challenges in such a concentrated amount of time. And so I really think that that gives you the space to take those on. And I think it happens both in a curricular format in your classes, but in a co curricular framework also in terms of club leadership, in terms of social interactions, in terms of immersions and travel, in terms of case competitions and things like this. So it's just the rapid fire breadth of opportunities that happen in that concentrated amount of time.
• 15:00
  Speaker A: Yeah, and I feel like there's just so much that happens in the MBA and in terms of just the caliber of students that you're surrounded by. And as you just said, I'm thinking about the teams I worked on before business school and a company I worked at and then my classmates in business school. It's just a completely different group. And learning alongside all those folks really opens doors and eyes and they bring.
• 15:26
  Speaker B: An amazing amount of experience. You may be challenged on a dimension that you've just never even thought of or never heard of. That's a joy as a professor too, because you see these people from different backgrounds and industries challenging each other and it creates a really fertile learning environment.
• 15:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. So tell me, how does the MBA experience expand students exposure to industries, roles and employers again, in ways that you couldn't replicate if you just stayed out there in the workforce?
• 15:54
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, just the network effects of joining an mba, as you well know, is just immense. So immediately you're tapping into the network of the school, the companies, the alumni base that's involved in that school, the professors. I mean, we all have probably taught at a couple of schools. We work with industry, we consult. We've had hundreds, if not thousands of students through our classrooms. So we have enormous networks that I am constantly, almost on a weekly basis, connecting a current student with an alumni or somebody who's connected with me through consulting or through some other part of my life. The alumni network, iu, depending on the way you measure it, IU has the largest living alumni network. And those alumni I've been at a couple of schools now and I've been super impressed with. I've never called an IU alum, whether I know them or not, and had them say no to connecting with a student and also peers in your program. Again, I think that's really important that everybody's coming in with their own network. So you're building a network with your peers in the program and then that second level network with everybody they're networked with. And then again these structured and curated experiences in the program that are meant to enhance your network and build your connections and build it in this rapid way. And that's one of the things that the people who come into Our academies, which is again our first year industry deep dive experiences. And again the one I'm involved in is the Consumer Marketing Academy. But I tell them on the first day, your LinkedIn is going to look dramatically different at the end of this first semester. And they interact with 10 or 12 companies. We go on an immersion where we go to five cities and visit several companies. We have scores of alumni come back and do panels and rapid fire kind of speed dating type of things. And every one of those people becomes a connection, a resource. I just don't know how you could build that, you know, just by going to mixers or staying in the same lane that you're in before. Right. So it's just amazing how many doors are open in this manner.
• 18:02
  Speaker A: And I think, I mean Kelly has a bit of a reputation in this domain for both those kind of those sort of concentrations or academies as you called them, and also the kind of ME Inc. And all the work that's done by the career office to get people. I know employers often are raving about the caliber of Kelley students out when they're out there looking for work. So at some point though, everyone looks qualified on paper. Candidates have similar resumes. So how does having done the MBA and kind of building that broader perspective, how does that help students to stay competitive and make more intentional career decisions as they move forward in their career?
• 18:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's a couple things to that. So certainly, and I would argue as a little bit of an academic that the fundamental knowledge and the expertise you're gaining in these programs can really separate you and you can gain specific expertise that again would be difficult to do if you kind of just stayed in your lane like building skills on specific types of financial modeling within marketing. Learning about pricing models as an example has differentiated a lot of students coming out. Things like customer based corporate valuation is something that a lot of people in mainstream finance are not thinking about, but like marrying that customer CLV based modeling. So you kind of come out with this, this fundamental differentiating knowledge that I think would be hard to gather somewhere else also. Again, like this breadth of experience. Right. You have a chance to, instead of staying in that one lane, come and get an internship, perhaps at a different company, perhaps in a different field. You can engage in all of this fundamental knowledge building outside of that core competency, building deeper core competency in the lane that you're in, engaging with corporate projects and consulting projects with different firms. So it's almost like you're getting that. That's one of the reasons I think people are excited about. And it's sexy to go into consulting because you get to work with all these different companies on all these different problems and build this breadth of experience. In a way you're able to replicate that in the one to two years that you're in an MBA program. And as you just mentioned, specifically speaking about Kelly, we have a lot of structured things to help that happen, like our preterm meeting, our career coaches and certainly our professors really work programmatically and just kind of serendipitously to help people understand their strengths, clarify their goals, and help them confidently articulate what is their differentiator. So I'm a marketing guy, so understanding your point of differentiation, I'm all about that. And we talk about that all the time.
• 20:42
  Speaker A: Yeah. And it's funny because we talk a lot on this show as people are thinking about preparing their applications or being competitive as they apply to business school.
• 20:49
  Speaker B: School.
• 20:50
  Speaker A: We talk a lot about, you know, you kind of the, your, how are you going to brand yourself? How are you going to pitch your, what's your elevator pitch to a school? I feel like I'd be remiss. So I know that. Yeah. And I know that Kelly, you know, lots of candidates graduate, go off to consulting, finance, all the, all the kind of, you know, usual kind of things that we see top MBA grads doing. But I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you to talk just briefly about. I mean, you have this focus on brand management. You're a marketing guy and, and Kelly is well situated with its location. There's so many big companies in the Midwest of the United States that are, you know, like, you know, just how do they call household names? Right. So just big time brands. And I'm wondering, like. Yeah, just we don't ever really talk much about that domain. So just any insights or like what kinds of jobs do people go off and do and what are some of the companies out there that, you know, Kelly has relationships with?
• 21:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, Kelly recruits across the board. Finance ops, certainly consulting. We do really well. As you just mentioned, my focus is on consumer marketing. And I would say overwhelmingly the students that come in to Kelley interested in consumer marketing ultimately want to get into brand management. And that can run the gamut from consumer durables at ge, appliance toys at Mattel. But historically and geographically, as you're referring to is we're kind of right in the CPG belt. Right. We're around General Mills, ConAgra, Procter Gamble, Nestle I have to say Nestle. I'm the Nestle faculty.
• 22:23
  Speaker A: Oh, that's right.
• 22:24
  Speaker B: But they all hire our students and largely in a lot of marketing functions. But brand management. And brand management has a really, I think, a really interesting benefit in the sense that the emphasis is on management. Right. So you have to love brands. You have to love consumer insights. People love seeing their work out in the real world in the wild, like knowing you developed a product and you worked with packaging and you worked with pr and you worked with merchandising and retail ops, and then you see it in the store and your friends and family are using it. People absolutely love that. But in the. In the big picture, and most of the companies I just mentioned will say this, that they're. They're hiring not just someone who knows a lot about brands or consumers, but someone who could be a CEO. Right. You are. The real, I think, appealing thing about brand management is that you're running a business within a business. You own the P and L of that brand. You're on a small team that's trying to build that kind of a small business within a large business with these other resources. And you're kind of touching everything from, like I said, ops and distribution, legal design. So you kind of get to be the second smartest person in the room on all of these different dimensions to run this small business. And if you love brands and you love consumer insights like I do and a lot of my students do, it's just such a great world to live in.
• 23:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I could see, you know, it's funny, you're talking about the joy of being involved in something that people see on a shelf somewhere or out. And, you know, when you design a new derivative product, you know, as a finance person, I don't think anyone's like, oh, yeah, we saw that down at the mall. You know, that's not happening. Right. So there's a lot of nice things. But I appreciate you kind of shedding some light on that because it. I think it's kind of a little bit of a unique offering that you guys have based on your location and some of the talented faculty like yourself in this domain.
• 24:19
  Speaker B: I got to tell you, a lot of people ask me why I'm here, and that's the reason dealing with these companies on a daily or weekly basis and putting our students in those companies is exciting. I love to see consumer marketing, consumer goods out there in this way.
• 24:36
  Speaker A: Yeah. So one thing, I wanted to kind of circle back on the growth and the leadership and things that happen in an MBA program. And so one of the things I wanted to kind of come back to is just for someone who's listening today, who's doing really well professionally and, and you know, maybe they even have a boss who's like, ah, you don't, you know, you don't need an mba. We hear a lot of that. You know, there are a lot of bosses out there who are kind of like, because they want to keep the, the employee.
• 24:58
  Speaker B: Right.
• 24:58
  Speaker A: But so someone who's doing. Yeah, someone who's doing really well and they're trying to decide like, is the MBA the right next step? What do you hope that they would take away from our conversation today as they think about their future?
• 25:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, this is an mba and it comes in a lot of different formats. You know, we have a very traditional two year mba. We also have our Kelly Direct program online. We also have a full time plus flex program where you can come here in and get that full first year in person experience for just year one and then you can finish online or you can finish abroad. So it gives a lot of flexibility and that second year. But whether it's kind of in that one year bite or the two year full two years in person, I really think it's a chance to level up, pivot and transform. It's a two year transformative experience. I've used the word transform a number of times because I really believe that's what happens. And you're giving yourself an opportunity to do that well beyond the classroom learning, again, the fundamental knowledge, the things you learn, the skills are well worth it in my view. But the breadth of experience is hard to find somewhere else. And you're giving yourself a one to two year Runway to build skills, gain expertise, grow as a leader and actualize perhaps your own ideas professionally, entrepreneurially, personally. And that's something also that you can get in a very clear track to become a consultant, to become a brand manager, to get into banking. And we see that all the time in the programs that I've been involved in. And that's perfectly fine. If people have that view and that knowledge of themselves that that's what they want to do, that helps you level up and build skills and build differentiation to accelerate. Right. But other people, they want to pivot, they're not sure what they want to do. Other people, the personal growth transformation or just the space to think about entrepreneurial ideas, other opportunities, other directions that you could go. That's really hard to replicate without kind of that two year space or that one year space to discover all these different things, be challenged on a daily basis, be around all of these other peers, professors and like minded individuals who are also trying to level up, pivot or transform.
• 27:22
  Speaker A: Yeah, that all makes sense. And it's funny, you know, we just talked. I think it was probably last week's episode on the show. We talked. We were talking about the online MBA offerings in the US and the US News rankings had just come out and we were talking about Kelly Direct is because it's almost always and is again this year the number one online MBA in the US So yeah, so yeah, there are a lot of ways to do it. But I could not agree more. I mean we talked before we came on air a little bit about I did an MBA too. And I just feel like, yeah, transformational, all the terms you just use, absolutely apply. Keith, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a really great conversation and I know you're a busy guy, so appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. And it's been a lot of fun to just kind of explore how an MBA can shape not just what you do now next, but how people think and lead over the long run. So really appreciate your time.
• 28:11
  Speaker B: Keith thanks, Graham. It was a pleasure to be here and happy to chat anytime.
• 28:15
  Speaker A: So that's a wrap on this episode of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen and tune in weekly for new conversations with admissions leaders and business school insiders.
• 28:38
  Speaker B: Sam.