Corp Strategy: Why take stairs when you can climb escalator?

Today I will talk about various career paths that can land you in a corporate strategy role. This will help you set your career expectations right when you write your goals essays for B-schools. In our experience we have seen a variety of ways to enter corporate strategy but I will walk you through the most generic ones.

Non-MBA Route

Stick to one organization and become a trusted employee in that organization. Keep on changing roles so that you get holistic exposure cutting across various functions. Once you have such exposure/visibility in the organization, try to specialize into one domain e.g. marketing, finance, operations or go into a corporate strategy support role. Few examples of corporate strategy support role are EA to CXO, team handling corporate proposals etc. Going through this route in around 15+ years you may land up in the coveted top-notch corporate strategy role.

MBA General Management Route

Going through MBA route helps you in 2 aspects. Firstly it increases your trustworthiness in terms of business planning & intelligence. Secondly it reduces your time to reach such a role since post-MBA you can directly land up either in a corporate strategy function in start-ups, smaller organizations or corporate strategy support functions or General Management roles in large organizations. The final step still takes time, experience and lot of internal networking, but in a nutshell depending on how you perform you may reach the top notch strategy position in around 8+ years.

MBA Consulting Route

Consulting jobs are among the most coveted jobs at any MBA campus, just because they are a fast track to learning and experiencing business problems in multiple sectors and companies. Hence the consulting route post MBA is the shortest path and inarguably the toughest path to top corporate strategy jobs. Usually after 4 to 5 years of strategy consulting a movement directly to corporate strategy position is well within reach.

Hence next time you plan to have corporate strategy as your short/long term goal, do decide for yourself which of the above path you would want to take. Also, do understand there could be other paths as well, just that above ones are the most statistically significant ones.

[Author is a consultant with a leading consulting firm and a mentor at Ivyctor.com]

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