Five leading business schools in Europe joined forces to host a career fair for companies seeking MBA graduates for work in Asia, the Financial Times reports. London Business School (LBS) hosted the November 2nd Asia Career Fair, together with HEC Paris, IESE, IMD and the Rotterdam School of Management. The event included company presentations, interviews and networking opportunities between students and 18 participating companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Bloomberg, Accenture and Shell.
“The idea is to make the life of the recruiter as easy as possible,” Javier Muñoz, MBA Career Services director at Spain’s IESE, told the FT. IESE hosted an earlier event in which the top European schools collaborated to connect students with recruiters from Latin America.
LBS’s graduates are increasingly looking toward jobs in Asia, Fiona Sandford, LBS executive director for careers and global business, told the FT. Twenty percent of last year’s class took their first post-MBA job in Asia or the Middle East, a huge shift from a decade ago, when the school placed almost all of its graduates in Europe, she said. The vibrancy of the Asian economy is the greatest draw, Sandford added, noting that 75 percent of LBS’s Chinese students returned to China last year. It was the first year that more Asian students returned to Asia upon graduating than stayed in Europe.
Roughly 450 students from across the five schools registered for the event, and many helped to organize it. Students who weren’t necessarily looking to land a job in Asia upon graduation still saw the experience as a chance to network for future jobs, according to the FT report.
The five European business schools are considering further collaboration, including in the admissions process, the FT reports.
