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Avoid the Biggest MBA App Mistake: Market Your Transferable Skills!

Avoid the Biggest MBA App Mistake: Market Your Transferable Skills!

Today we want to talk about arguably the biggest and most common mistake we see on MBA applications, which is failing to market transferable skills.  More importantly, we want to talk about how to fix that problem. 

In working with clients of all age, gender, nationality, and industry, one thing we're always trying to do is identify things that connect everyone - common elements that become and remain true, regardless of differences. To be honest, there aren't many such elements. Almost everything about the MBA admissions process is a contextual exercise. You can almost never divorce a unique applicant or a specific school from your analysis. It's part of the reason this is such a difficult endeavor for people, part of the reason why so many admissions consultants do a horribly incomplete job of advising candidates, and a huge part of the reason why admissions consulting even exists. You have to do a lot of things right and you have to do them with great contextual specificity.  If you confront "one size fits all" advice, typically you can sprint away from that as fast as possible.

That said, there is one universal truth that we have uncovered that seems largely overlooked by the rest of the MBA admissions landscape and that is how enormously important it is to abide by what we call the Art of Transferability.