October 31, 2002 | Read Time: 8 minutes
TOOLS AND TRAINING
By Alicia Abell
When John Vogel graduated from Harvard Business School in 1980, job seekers who held master’s
of business administration degrees were regarded with suspicion by nonprofit employers, he says: “They weren’t pure enough, or they had suspect motives or something.”
Today, nonprofit organizations are much more receptive to graduates of M.B.A. programs, says Mr. Vogel, who once headed the nonprofit Neighborhood Development Corp. of Jamaica Plain, in Boston, and is now faculty director for the James M. Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship, at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.
Charity managers echo his opinion. In some cases, they say, they actively seek M.B.A. holders over other job candidates, because of their organizations’ need to function more like businesses to attract funds. Even so, holders of business degrees aren’t nearly as common on nonprofit staffs as those who hold master’s of public administration diplomas.
For those considering charity work, previous work experience and career goals can help determine whether a master’s degree in business will prove helpful in their search for the right position. Some nonprofit jobs and organizations are a better fit than others for M.B.A. holders.
Overlapping Course Work
Although both business and public-administration master’s degree programs may offer concentrations in nonprofit management, those programs provide different types of training that can determine their value in the nonprofit job market. Originally designed to prepare students for careers in government and public service, M.P.A. programs remain the traditional route for people pursuing careers at charities. M.B.A. programs, in contrast, have typically prepared students for jobs in the for-profit field.
The course work in business and public-administration programs overlaps quite a bit: Students learn similar analytical and quantitative skills in both.
Stephanie Lowell, who completed a joint M.B.A.-M.P.A. degree at Harvard Business School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1999, says the main difference is one of focus. The M.B.A. degree tends to focus more on management of individual organizations, while the M.P.A. is more about broad policy issues, says Ms. Lowell, author of The Harvard Business School Guide to Careers in the Nonprofit Sector (Harvard Business School Press, 2000, $22.95). In business school, she says, “every class is, ‘If you were the CEO of this organization, what would you do?, ‘” a perspective that was much less common in her public-administration program.
Kathy O’Regan, a former Yale University business-school professor who now teaches at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service, usually advises students interested in nonprofit careers to pursue a master’s in public administration. However, she cautions, because a nonprofit manager also needs to acquire strong management skills, a student with ambitions to lead a charity should pick an M.P.A. program that offers opportunities to learn those things as well.
Some nonprofit jobs, though, may be better suited to a candidate with a master’s in business, Ms. O’Regan says. For example, she says, an M.B.A. can be a better choice for those whose nonprofit jobs will bring them in frequent contact with the business world, such as people who manage real estate for university or hospital. The degree might also be useful for people who expect to shuttle back and forth between nonprofit and for-profit positions, she says.
Both Ms. O’Regan and Ms. Lowell also advise considering past work experience when choosing a degree. For most people who want to transition into the nonprofit world, a public-administration degree fills knowledge gaps in areas like fund raising, grant-proposal writing, and nonprofit governance that many business programs simply don’t teach (although a handful of master’s-level business programs now offer a concentration in nonprofit management). But for those students who have already worked in the nonprofit field, a business degree can provide the management and quantitative skills they might lack.
Finding the Right Job
According to charity managers, the main advantage of the M.B.A. is its focus on management skills — on how to actually run an organization. Business-school graduates also know how to speak the same language as the bankers and other for-profit managers who can be so critical to a nonprofit group’s success. The M.B.A. signals that a person knows how to do the kind of rigorous financial analysis and performance-based evaluation used in the business world, Mr. Vogel says. Some schools of public administration now have nonprofit-management programs that include finance courses, he adds, but they may not be taught at the same level as in business school.
Because people who have earned M.B.A.’s receive so much training in general management, they are particularly good candidates for executive-director positions, says Mike Bingham, head of Twin Cities Rise, in Minneapolis, a group that focuses on training urban adults for jobs that pay enough to lift them above the poverty line. Finance-related roles are another obvious match, he says: Investment managers at foundations and chief financial officers often have business degrees.
It is also not unusual for an M.B.A. holder with a focus in marketing to serve as a nonprofit organization’s vice president of marketing and communications, say charity leaders. It is less common, however, for business-school graduates to wind up as program directors or fund raisers, according to Ms. Lowell, because those jobs require prior experience in the nonprofit world.
In addition to certain roles, there are also certain types of organizations that suit M.B.A. holders best, says Mr. Vogel. Large organizations tend to hire more business-school graduates than do small ones. Organizations that have hundreds of employees, or are national or international in scope, are complex enough to need people with specific skills in public relations or in marketing, for example, and thus better able to take advantage of employees with business expertise, he says.
Small and mid-size charities are less equipped to exploit the talents of business-degree holders, says Mr. Bingham. Because so many of these graduates have been trained at big consulting or investment-banking firms, which allow workers to specialize, they don’t develop the entrepreneurial savvy needed at small organizations, he says.
Which isn’t to say, however, that smaller charities will dismiss business-school graduates out of hand. At the Children’s Hunger Fund Foundation, in Mission Hills, Calif., which has a staff of 14, the organization hasn’t yet exhibited an urgent need for an employee with a graduate diploma in business, says Tim Kirk, the group’s vice president of operations. However, he adds, that may change as the charity grows and interacts more with the for-profit world while competing with other nonprofit groups for money.
The Role of Mission
An organization’s mission can also determine its need for business skills. Economic- and community-development groups, which look for people with strong business orientations and finance backgrounds, are particularly good matches for job candidates who hold M.B.A.’s, says Ms. Lowell. Similarly, foundations and venture-philanthropy organizations, which focus on a small number of grant recipients and give them lots of hands-on management help, are friendly to business-school graduates because they need employees with investment skills, she says.
Advocacy organizations, however, are less inclined to hire business-diploma holders. Not only do those groups need workers who understand policy more than workers with management skills, but they are often particularly focused on finding employees who share their values and understand their culture. A nonprofit background indicates that kind of passion and commitment more clearly than a business pedigree, charity managers say.
Regardless of a group’s mission, a business-school graduate may have to pay particular attention, more so than a job candidate with a more traditional nonprofit background, to showing his or her commitment to the cause of the charity where he or she wants to work, says Ms. O’Regan. That is particularly key for M.B.A. holders who want to shift from for-profit to nonprofit work. “You should spend some serious time volunteering — and not just an hour a week — at an organization you think you might have skills for,” advises Mr. Bingham, who came to Twin Cities Rise after co-founding a for-profit health-services company and obtained his master’s in business administration from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. Ms. O’Regan recommends that M.B.A. candidates who are still in school seek a nonprofit internship to burnish their charity credentials.
In the end, of course, what matters most is a job candidate’s overall abilities, not just the type of degree he or she holds, says John Huber, vice president for leadership and organizational development at Goodwill Industries International, in Bethesda, Md.
“To me, it always comes back to competence,” he says. “Let me know what competencies you have, and how that matches up with what we’re looking for.” If a candidate’s background and training fit the job profile, he suggests, the “B” or the “P” on a résumé might not make much of a difference after all.
Does having a master’s of business administration degree help a manager in the nonprofit world? Share your thoughts in the Job Market online forum.
