Abstract

Graduate business programs, especially the Master of Business Administration (MBA), admits students from all different disciplines – including but not limited to, science and engineering, humanities, social sciences, medicine. The goal is to equip future managers in various industry sectors with the requisite administrative, corporate, and leadership skills; sometimes with a special focus in a particular area such as finance, human resource management, entrepreneurship, etc. Such wide variations in both intake attributes and outcome expectations have led to a decades-long debate on whether graduates from MBA programs have the necessary skills as demanded by the marketplace (Costigan & Brink, 2015; Navarro, 2008; Rubin & Dierdorff, 2013). Rapidly changing business environment, predominantly driven by technological changes, globalization, economic and demographic shifts makes it imperative for business schools to keep their curriculum updated (Ritter et al., 2018). In addition, recent studies (Alam et al., 2022) have also indicated that MBA graduates with undergraduate education in science and engineering related disciplines tend to perform better academically and professionally. Considering these, we address two questions in this research. First, what are the skills that are currently in demand for graduates of MBA programs? Second, are these skills more aligned with competencies in science and technology? To answer these questions, we utilize artificial intelligence (AI) tools and algorithms to identify required skills and competencies and subsequently group them into meaningful categories from real-time online job postings. To this end, we utilize online job postings requiring/preferring an MBA degree in the state of Pennsylvania,

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