What you are saying is very North American or Western European centric thinking and that too in post 80s orgs. More traditional orgs -- in construction, finance, import export, transport, shipping -- tend to have minimal entry requirements with MBA. Its just one more checkmark. I have seen this in action. A friend of mine with good skills in managing teams was denied an AVP level tech position in a major media house because he was not having a post grad management degree. He did his MBA on part time with BITS in India and was able to get similar roles. There is still a major chunk of orgs who recruit based on your degrees and creds. One can make them as their starting point to develop their experience.
Yes, even here in Canada this thinking is still there. Eg: the job I have currently wanted a bachelor's degree or a SCMP certificate at least. Now that I am in the roll, I only need basic computer skill. Don't even need 12th grade education to do what I do. And of course, the white Canadian who is in the same position but senior to me due to age/experience only has a technician diploma. Anyway, I digress. This mentality is even more prevalent in GCC countries.
If you intend to move to GCC, why don't you just reach out to few folks in GCC with roles similar to what you want or higher (preferably higher) on Linkedin? It may look annoying from the perspective of other party but lets be honest here: do you have anything to lose here? At worst you will get a lot of "no replies" but thats the worst of it. If you want to end up in GCC, why not get critical info from the horse mouth?
I did something similar way back in 2011 when I had to know about suitability of PhD from Tokyo. I reached out to foreign/indian researchers in Japan who did their degrees from Japan and were working there. I got a lot of inputs. When you have a direct line why guess? Take Linkedin Premium for a month or so as it makes your job easier. Its cheap. Like 25 dollars cheap.
Find few companies that you want to work in there. Find folks in them. Ask them. Simple. Ask your queries. Rinse and repeat few times and you will get a general idea or lack of it. If its lack of it then things are very situational -- which is fine too! You will have to work with those baseline.
Basically, you are trying to get an ad-hoc mentor. It can be pulled off. Its mostly a numbers game. Reach out to 30 and get 3-4 responses.
One more option is to do what I call linkedin window shopping. Go through the profiles of folks working in roles you want to have in GCC on linkedin and see how they might have reached there. Their past experience and education is on display. So you have some data points to work with. Its useful too though not totally accurate.
I used the above method (window shopping) back in the day to get an admit from a really good US university. Basically by analyzing the kind of folks they send admits to (I used to collect resumes of their recent grads), I was able to narrow down what they wanted to hear in application package. I applied only to that univ and got the admit there. I did not go there but thats a very different story.
I have already did the cold texting, a fair bit of it. I still do it actually but never focused on it from your pov! Okay, lets see how it goes then.
Having grown up there, I already know a lot of stuff that I need to be doing. One can ask, well if I knew everything about career progression in GCC, why am I so lost now? It's a long story and I have my reasons but a major factor is also that GCC region stayed pretty much the same from 1970s boom years to 2014. From then on, it has changed every day, for the worse you can say. They are prioritizing very highly skilled people over low/decently skilled intensely. More on this later.
I have worked internationally for the large part of my life. So, my perspective is definitely EU and NA based. One thing about these traditional orgs that you listed is that most of them are shrinking verticals(I think fintech isn't a shrinking vertical yet). By shrinking, I mean these companies only focus on reducing operational costs as they're unlikely to hit inflection points and live on incremental growth. Would make sense for these companies to hire less ambitious and mediocre candidates.
But, I'm definitely seeing a small percentage of people who have vertical focused experience (e.g. fisheries, warehousing, etc) also take management positions as they build "career defensibility" and are almost irreplaceable. So, hopefully the trend changes there to accommodate worthy applicants.
Definitely. However, if someone is trying to improve their career - those organizations are not the right fit for them. Sub optimal pay and lack of opportunities to help a candidate carefully craft their executive role. After all, your career growth potential = environment of the company * your skills.
100% agree with getting into an org with good opportunities. Living in GCC, you more or less get good/optimal pay but the type of experience can be very different.
I think if you want to go back to the GCC then the MBA is a good idea, mainly because they have a strong preference for people with Western education and experience, so they don't mind paying a premium in terms of salary to bring someone on board with that kind of background, because they feel they will enrich their organization. They've also always been snobby when it comes to treating and paying Western nationals compared to nationals from the developing world, it's always been part of their mindset.
I don't really know how others get along with Indian qualifications here in the job market, I'm assuming if they have good experience from large internationally known corporations, there is less of an emphasis on where they get their educational credentials from. Do you feel you're primarily disadvantaged because your institution is not well known in India or because it's an Indian qualification in general?
YESSS!
Multitude of reasons but mostly indian nationality and indian low grade credentials, a metric ton of nepotism also can be added to the list.
But one thing is given, if you have excellent experience but mediocre credentials, a few good jobs may not be offered to you unless you have a gold medal or something in your education. This is only valid for freshers though. Of course there comes a time where creds dont matter at all. Also this would probably mean a recruiter reaching out to you, instead you submitting your resume to them.
ECA is mandatory to get admission?
Yes, so far in my case it is. Any foreign credential used to apply for a course in Canada as a PR or Citizen needs an equivalency cert from WES/ICAS, and a course by course assessment (for IRCC the assessment type is different.)
WES did it for me in less than 5 days, far faster from the 1-3 month time it took when I applied for the first time.
