Your Career

Personal and Professional Career Assessment

A pause for reflection

For the students in our MBA Program, Harvard Business School is not a final destination, but an important point of transition that prepares them for the opportunities that lie ahead. That's why Career Services is an integral part of any HBS experience.

Upon your arrival at Harvard Business School, you'll find one of the most precious resources of all: time for reflection. To fully benefit from our MBA Program experience—including immersive class participation through the case method, Learning Teams, section life, and extracurricular activities—you need time to concentrate on your new environment. In fact, we believe it's important to postpone the recruitment process until you have had the opportunity to build a successful academic foundation at HBS.

Before the formal recruiting process begins for first-year students in mid-November, you can pursue a meaningful career exploration that begins with a personal self-assessment process supported with industry introductions, peer Career Teams and individual career coaching. HBS Career Services offers support for the job seeking strategies most comfortable to you, including on-campus recruiting, a self-directed job search or a combination of the two.

Start with a self-assessment

The search for the "right career" begins with a search of one's self: who you are, what you want, where you would like to go. Before you arrive on campus, we ask you to complete CareerLeader®, an online self-assessment tool developed by a member of the HBS faculty and used by over 400 businesses and universities around the world. Through this process, you can evaluate your deepest life interests, your business skills, and your own work/reward values. During the first few weeks on campus, you will participate in a class in which you interpret the results of the self-assessment and discuss brief career cases involving HBS alumni.

Introductions to industries

HBS’s formal recruitment period for first-year students is preceded by Industry Weeks, a series of on-campus programs and panels that will help you establish a fundamental understanding of various sectors – including industry overviews, areas of opportunity and how to successfully navigate a job search. Through informative sessions with Career Services staff, Career Coaches, Alumni and company representatives, Industry Weeks can help you make more educated decisions about potential career paths.

Career Teams offer peer support

You may continue your exploration by joining Career Teams, a program enabling first-year students to advance their long-term career discovery in a supportive, stimulating, and fun environment with a small group of other HBS students. Participants increase their career self-awareness, and help their peers to do the same, through use of a cutting-edge framework and exercises facilitated by trained second-year leaders.

Create your personal job search plan

As you learn more about opportunities for summer internships and other career-related experiences, you’ll find that there are many ways to pursue your options.  You may choose to participate in on-campus recruiting, when many companies visit the HBS campus to interview for summer and full-time positions.  You may also choose a self-directed job search in which you pursue opportunities outside of the typical recruiting cycle.  Or you may choose to start your own business and forgo recruiting altogether.  Whatever you decide, Career Services has the resources to assist you with your job search.

One-on-one career coaching
Lei Lei

“Filling out my career leader profile, talking with a career coach, and participating in career teams opened up the world for me and gave me a chance to really think about what I want to do with my life.”

Lei Lei MBA '07

Throughout your MBA Program experience, more than 35 trained Career Coaches are available to work one-on-one with you along every step of your career trajectory from initial self-assessment through the job search and beyond. Experienced business professionals, our coaches can help you as you craft your résume and cover letters, create and execute a search strategy, prepare for interviews and offer negotiations, and improve your networking techniques.

The resources available through Career Services can help you explore emerging interests and investigate further opportunities for professional and personal growth.

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