安德鲁·斯托里于2008年毕业于康奈尔大学的约翰逊管理学院，当时正值经济危机，但是他认为自己是个幸运的人。尽管当时许多公司都受到了经济危机的冲击，使得MBA的工作情况并不乐观，但是他还是在总部位于英国的Booz & Co.公司找到了一份不错的工作，这家公司是他在2007年夏天实习过的一家公司。但是同当时其他的许多顾问公司一样，Booz & Co.也受到了很大的冲击，斯托里表示，随着手中的工作开始减少，Booz的员工也开始担忧自己的未来。这些事情都是显而易见而又无法避免的。
2009年秋天，斯托里最担心的事还是发生了。当时包括他在内的100多名员工一起失业了，其中有一部分人是刚刚拿到MBA的文凭。面对这样的情况，斯托里并不是到人才市场上试图寻找一个与Booz类似的工作，他重新定位自己，在Clinton Health Access Initiative找到了一份工作，他本人曾在这家研究所做过志愿者。斯托里表示，当Booz的大局已定，我并没有只是抱怨为什么这种事会发生在我的身上？我又没有做错什么。从那时开始，斯托里开始升职。事情发生时，要选择顺时而动，然后看它到底能把你带到哪里。
斯托里的经历是独一无二的吗？据调查显示，在2008年毕业的MBA当中，许多人都是选择去人才市场碰碰运气。此次调查是从美国前30名MBA院校中，随机抽取30名学生；从国际前10院校中，每个学校抽取10名学生，共计是1000人。目前可收集到的数据只有889人，其中44%，也就是393人，已经离开了刚毕业时的公司。剩下的56%还依然留在先前工作的公司，而在这些人中，已经有近一半的人在公司的内部职位发生了变化。
萧条的就业环境
事实上，萧条就意味着动荡不安。失去联系的那111名学生是仍然处于失业状态还是仅仅是处于隐私的考虑不想有过多的联系？那些跳槽的人是有了更好的职业发展还是找到了真正满意的工作？那么经过了3年的磨练，2008届的毕业生与之前的MBA相比又会有什么不同呢？
哈佛大学经济学家理查德·弗里曼，同时也是美国国家经济研究局的主任，表示，在经济萧条时期，在大多数人都倾向于保住手中的工作时，MBA跳槽的几率较高。这是因为，许多MBA在刚一毕业时找到的工作都不是特别理想的去处，等合适的机会一出现，他们当然会毫不犹豫的选择更好的机会。
MBA就业服务委员会主席尼科尔·霍尔表示，2008届的毕业生跳槽的几率是比往届的毕业生要高。或许经济危机时导致MBA跳槽的主要原因，越来越多的公司不愿意再去雇佣那些刚刚毕业，没有多少实际工作经验的学生。这样，为了能够进入到某一行业工作，许多刚毕业的学生就不得不接受低于期望值的待遇。霍尔表示，这对2008届的毕业生来说恐怕是最难忍受的事了。他们不仅面临有限的选择，而且还没有太多转换的空间。
连锁反应
即使是那些已经在各自领域内找到合适岗位的幸运儿也没能逃过金融危机的影响。Brian Stempeck在2008年毕业于北加利福尼亚大学，毕业后在Bain & Co.任职，但是在毕业后的几个月之间，他眼看着许多在房地产或者是金融行业的同学都纷纷下岗失业了。
出于工作稳定的考虑，他做了一个有违常理的决定——他放弃了在Bain的工作，成为了The Trade Desk的第十名员工，这是一家纽约的公司，目的是帮助市场主体在线购买广告。一年前的The Trade Desk还是只有10个员工的公司，现在这支队伍已经扩大到了25人，而Brian Stempeck也晋升为The Trade Desk的商务拓展副总经理，他表示，换工作是有风险的，但是我个人认为从长远来说，还是比较有利于个人发展的。
但对有些人而言，经济危机对他们似乎并没有什么影响。Amy Steel Vanden-Eykel，2008年毕业于哈佛商学院，在入学前，曾有着7年策略顾问的从业经验，如果不是求学，她准备到一家消费品公司从事商务工作。上学期间曾在运动品牌耐克公司实习了一段时间，然而她最终接受了专营办公用品史泰博公司的邀请。到目前为止，她已经得到了三次晋升的机会，现在是这家公司技术创新总监。
Vanden-Eykel表示，我承认自己很幸运。而且我不认为经济危机对我的职业选择造成了什么影响。
金融？还是重新考虑一下吧
但并不是谁都像Vanden-Eykel这样幸运，尤其是那些从事金融行业的人。当时许多毕业生都纷纷奔向了投资银行，但是这些人的华尔街之梦，随着雷曼兄弟的破产也破灭了。据调查，这些人中，将近有一半的学生都开始重新制定职业计划，转而选择一些地方银行或者是规模较小的金融公司。
专家建议，MBA学员必须要重新思考自己的未来，因为也许在几年之后，你原来考虑的行业已经不复存在了。MBA的学员必须要学会面对逆境，但同时也要学会灵活变通，学着向前看，尽早开始规划职业生涯。
Andrew Storey considered himself one of the lucky ones when he graduated from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in 2008. Even though the economic downturn had made it tough for many MBAs to find jobs, he landed a plum position as a London-based consultant with Booz & Co., where he’d interned the previous summer. But like many consulting companies at the time, Booz was hit hard by the economic downturn, and Storey says recent hires began to worry about their jobs as project work began to slow. Says Storey: “It was one of those things where you could see the writing on the wall.”
His worst fears were realized in the fall of 2009, when he and about 100 other workers in the London office, many also recent MBA graduates, were laid off. Rather than flounder around in the job market looking for a similar gig, Storey chose to reinvent himself, taking a job with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, where he had volunteered in the past. “When things were going bad at Booz, I didn’t sit back and say, ‘Why is this happening to me? I’ve done everything right,’ ” says Storey, who has since been promoted. “You roll with it and see where it takes you.”
Just how unique is Storey’s tale? Turns out his nimble approach to the roiling job market was fairly common among his peers from the MBA class of 2008, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of the career paths taken by 1,000 graduates from that class. We randomly chose 30 graduates from each of the 30 top-ranked U.S. MBA programs and 10 graduates from each of the top 10 international programs. Current job data were collected fromLinkedIn (LNKD) profiles and compared to the jobs reported by respondents in the 2008Bloomberg Businessweek MBA student survey. Of the 889 students for whom data were available, 393, or 44 percent, had changed employers since graduating. The remaining 496 graduates, or 56 percent, were still at their first post-MBA employers, with about half of those, or 52 percent, having changed jobs within their respective companies.
RECESSION JOB MARKET
Exactly what this means is uncertain. Are the 111 graduates without LinkedIn profiles unemployed, or just private? Did those who changed employers advance their careers, or grab the first available job? And after three years in the job market, how does the Class of 2008 compare to those that came before?
Harvard economist Richard Freeman, who also serves as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, says the number of people changing employers seems high for a recession, when most people tend to stay put in their current jobs. However, he believes that many business school graduates likely settled for less-than-ideal jobs when they graduated, and were quick to jump on more promising opportunities when they came along. Says Freeman: “They took a short hit and maybe they never got back to quite as good a job as they would have gotten had they come out of school during a boom period.”
MBA Career Services Council President Nicole Hall agrees that 2008 graduates appear to have moved on to a second job at a higher rate than normal. The economic downturn probably had the most impact on career switchers, as employers became more reluctant to hire graduates with limited experience in the industry, says Hall, who also serves as the executive director of alumni and career services at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. As a result, these students were forced to take a lower wage or title than they would have liked in order to enter the field. “That was probably the most difficult part for the Class of 2008,” Hall says. “Their opportunities were limited, and from that standpoint they didn’t have a lot of flexibility.”
RIPPLE EFFECTS
Even those fortunate career switchers who managed to land a job in their field of choice were not immune to the ripple effects of the financial meltdown. Brian Stempeck, a 2008 graduate of the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business Schooland a former journalist, scored a job as a consultant at Bain & Co. after graduation, but then stood on the sidelines watching as dozens of his classmates, especially those entering real estate or finance, had job offers rescinded or were laid off in the months following graduation.
Feeling less secure, he made a counterintuitive move, ditching his job at Bain after two years to become the 10th employee of The Trade Desk, a venture-backed startup in New York that helps marketers buy advertising from an online ad exchange. “I personally felt like I lost a lot of faith or trust that the jobs at big companies would always be there,” says Stempeck, now vice-president of business development at The Trade Desk, which has grown from 10 to 25 employees since he joined a year earlier. “Moving jobs was risky, but I felt it would be more stable in the long term.”
For others the financial crisis had little, if any, impact on their career progression and goals. Amy Steel Vanden-Eykel, a 2008 Harvard Business School graduate, spent seven years working in the strategy consulting field before business school, and was looking to move into a business role at a consumer-goods company. After interning at sporting-goods maker Nike, she ultimately decided to accept a job offer at the office-supply store Staples. Now on her third promotion, she is currently serving as the company’s director of technology initiatives.
“Things have worked out really well for me here,” says Vanden-Eykel. “In the end, I don’t feel like any of the opportunities that I had were waylaid at all by the meltdown.”
RETHINKING FINANCE
Not all were as fortunate as Vanden-Eykel, especially those who accepted jobs in finance. At the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, where about 15 percent of the class typically goes into investment banking, many students with Wall Street dreams became reluctant career switchers after the Lehman Brothers collapse, says Alumni Career Services Director Connie English. She estimates she worked with more than 50 of them in the year or so after their graduation, helping them rethink their career plans, such as how to move from a bulge bracket bank to a smaller boutique firm or regional bank.
Typically by the two-year mark after graduation, about 70 percent of Darden MBAs are still working at their first post-MBA employer, while 30 percent have left their jobs for new positions, English says. Those numbers held true for Darden’s 2008 MBA class, but there were key differences. When Darden checked back in with the class in May 2010, 28 percent were no longer with their first post-MBA employer, and 38 percent of those–or 11 percent of the entire class–had been laid off.
“People had to really rethink what they were going to be, because what they thought they were going to do wasn’t going to exist in the next few years,” she says. “The class had to face adversity, but they’ve also learned some really strong lessons about resilience, looking ahead, and how to take personal responsibility early on for their careers.”
Those 2008 graduates who managed to make a go of it in the battered finance world were forced to do some serious introspection about their career paths, with some deciding to leave the field entirely. Angela Kung Shulman, a 2008 graduate of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, managed to snag her ideal job after graduation as an investment banker atJPMorgan’s technology group in San Francisco. She’d had an exciting internship there the previous summer, working on an initial public offering for a social-networking company, helping make presentations to potential investors and learning the ins and outs of the business. But when she arrived to start her job in the fall of 2008, she found herself in a radically different environment, with nervous managers, reluctant clients, and barely any deals going through despite constant pitching on her part.
“Even though I had intended staying for a couple of years, I couldn’t justify spending the next few years of my life like that,” says Shulman, who quit in 2009 to form a software company, ObjectLabs. “It didn’t seem like there was any end in sight.”
