An MBA can help you pick the required skill set. What is that skill set? Depends on whatever you want it to be. Your options range from opening a startup to managing a sports team to looking at a Bloomberg Terminal for the foreseeable future and earning huge trading commissions. Let’s look a brief picture of various domains and the work you will be expected to do. However, this is not an exhaustive list and you should feel free to start that band and take the stage by fire.
Finance
Finance has much more to offer beyond the much-glamorized field of Investment Banking. As a finance professional, you will be expected to analyze financial statements and report your finding or conduct a comprehensive study on a company and publish and Equity Research report. Valuing companies not your cup of tea? You can work at banks, undertaking credit appraisal or managing the risk of various complex financial securities. The most important thing to know is that finance is much more than accountancy and looking at a balance sheet and involves a lot of qualitative analysis and judgment as well.
Human Resource Management
A human resource manager is tasked with not only finding the right talent pool for the organization but to ensure that those employed must enjoy the workplace as well as get properly compensated. You will be expected to design incentive mechanisms and work towards improving eh organization structure. Apart from the generalist HR, you can also specialize in specific fields of HR such as industrial relations. One of the most important tasks of a human resource manager is to design the appraisal mechanism for each job role to measure the performance level of each employee.
General Management
Colloquially referred to as GenMan, the profile is one of the most coveted profiles in any business school and offers you the opportunity to not work as a specialist but work cross-domain and align individual departments to an overall strategy. At the start of your career, you will be rotated between various departments in order for you to understand the business comprehensively. A GenMan profile candidate does not specialize in any specific domain but instead specializes in a specific industry. Why is General Management coveted? Companies like TAS and Mahindra GMC offer profiles focused on General Management and eventually lead to leadership profiles.
Sales and Marketing
Often confused with Advertising, you will not be tasked with creating ads involving The Great Khali walking through walls. Instead, marketing involves conducting a comprehensive analysis to decide a brand image for your organization and deciding the target market for each of your products as well as designing marketing campaigns to attract and retain customers. Sales, on the other hand, involves travelling across India and negotiating with wholesalers and ensuring a proper distribution channel for your products. Considered to be for the creative kind, one must realize that Marketing also involves number crunching and is not purely an art.
Operations
An operations manager ensures smooth implementation of all projects and processes that an organization undertakes. Usual titles include Supply Chain Manager or Logistics Manager. The work will include forecasting demand of various components relating to the product and ensuring proper procurement. Quality control forms a key component of the operations and you will be expected to find out the reason for defect and provide solutions. You will also be expected to take steps to improve organizations sustainability by reducing the use of resources in various processes. trivia, Operationally, one of the most efficient organizations in India is
Mumbai Dabbawalas!
Consulting
The primary job of a consultant is to provide an outside perspective and advise an organization regarding a specific problem. Your biggest competitor as a consultant is the company itself. One of the most highlighted jobs post MBA, you travel across geographies, working on multiple projects a year and design and implement solutions for an organization across domains such as Finance, Operations or Human Resource Management. A lot of people prefer consulting as you get to work on multiple domains across multiple industries and you can choose to specialize later on.
MBA will offer you enough opportunities to choose the field and career of your choice. While making the decision, you also need to consider relatively new but lucrative new fields such as Analytics. You should research individual fields separately and decide which field suits your skill set the most.