You know the ins and outs of the business environment. Whether it’s negotiating a deal, financial analysis, or planning the next great marketing strategy, you’ve got everything covered.
Now that you’ve finished your MBA, it’s time to create a cover letter and a top-notch resume to showcase your skills.
Many MBA graduates struggle to figure out how to format their post-educational resume. Our MBA graduate resume examples have helped many business professionals land their ideal job, so you can use them as effective resume templates to get started.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your MBA Graduate Skills & Work Experience
Your MBA has equipped you with the knowledge and abilities to be successful, but how do you showcase that in the skills on your resume?
Those who complete an MBA will have several business positions they could go into, so tailoring the skills you list to the specific role will be a great idea. For instance, your logistics and strategic planning skills would be great to focus on if you’re applying for a supply chain management position.
Here are some of the best MBA graduate skills to put on a resume.
9 best MBA graduate skills
- Business Planning
- Negotiation
- Risk Assessment
- Project Management
- Data Visualization
- Budgeting
- ROI Analysis
- HubSpot
- Microsoft Office
Sample MBA graduate work experience bullet points
Not everyone who has just graduated with an MBA has tons of work experience, and that’s ok. Your education has still equipped you with several examples you can put on your resume.
If you use examples from education, the grades you achieved or results like organizing data more efficiently during a project will help showcase your abilities.
Also, think back to any work experience or internships you completed and find numerical examples you can list in this section. Metrics like performance efficiency, ROI, or customer retention are all excellent metrics that hiring managers will love to see.
Here are a few samples:
- Analyzed KPI performance in HubSpot to identify 9 key areas that needed improvement to boost sales by 74%.
- Created a PowerPoint presentation showcasing performance metrics while negotiating with a venture capitalist to secure a $2 million deal to expand the company.
- Redesigned product shipping routes to cut transportation costs by 47% while reducing the time it took to complete routes by an average of 16 minutes.
- Completed a class project managing yearly business expenses, coming in $4,500 under budget and receiving a 99% overall grade.
Top 5 Tips for Your MBA Graduate Resume
- One page is an optimal length
- A single-page resume will present a concise and relevant overview of your skills. If you’re trying to narrow it down, focus on the position’s needs. Are you applying for a job in the financial sector? Then your ability to manage yearly budgets and conduct forecasting would be great to include.
- Reverse chronological formatting is best
- After completing your MBA, your skill set will be vastly different from where you began. Therefore, listing your most recent experiences first will showcase the most relevant examples of your current business planning and risk assessment abilities.
- Optimize by using business metrics
- The business world always operates around metrics like ROI and profit margins. Lean into those key numbers whenever possible in your examples.
- Short examples have the most impact
- You can have more impact on hiring managers with concise examples that are easy to understand. For instance, one sentence on how you created graphs and charts to help decision-makers process data 59% more efficiently would sufficiently showcase several skills.
- Emphasize your knowledge and technical ability
- You’ve just completed an intensive academic program and have tons of knowledge and technical ability. You can emphasize that in your examples, such as how your risk assessment abilities helped make 85% more accurate purchasing decisions.
Try to fill in aspects that your resume didn’t cover completely. You can use your cover letter to explain your passion for the company you’re applying to or how your education has equipped you for the role.
A resume objective would work well if you don’t have much work experience in the business sector. For instance, you could explain in a few sentences how you’ve managed cost analysis for three years, saving an average of $15,700 for businesses, and you’re eager to apply your skills as a financial analyst.
Many MBA graduates forget the importance of metrics and highly-specific examples. Therefore, getting as job-specific as possible will help you stand out. For instance, you could say how you revamped product descriptions to boost conversions by 37% when applying to a product management position.
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of BeamJobs. He started his career in data fulfilling the dream of little kids everywhere: working for an insurance company. He then moved on to work in edtech for a company called Chegg before venturing out to start BeamJobs. Things have come a long way after countless “learnings” (fancy word for mistakes), and BeamJobs has now helped 2.5M+ people create their perfect resume. Stephen and BeamJobs have been featured on awesome sites like Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, Zendesk, HubSpot, and loads more.
