Think beyond the traditional MBA career

Management graduates are being hired for roles focused on regulatory strategy and compliance risk. Large corporations like pharmaceutical companies, fintech companies, telecom companies and others need someone who can read a regulatory change and translate it into a business decision

The paths that an MBA degree most commonly leads to are consulting, banking or general management. Management education equips people with a particular way of thinking, including how to allocate resources, how to negotiate across competing interests, how to read a system and improve it and more. This way of thinking is useful in diverse arenas. Yet most of the new-age management careers are scarcely discussed, overshadowed by a handful of familiar, well-worn paths.

Revenue and pricing strategy

Few functions demand as unusual a mix of mathematics and psychology as pricing. The price of an airline seat can change before the flight departs. So can the price of a hotel room or a warehouse of inventory on an e-commerce site. Someone orchestrates these changes, often within minutes, using a combination of demand forecasts, competitor prices and an educated guess about consumer behaviour. Airlines, hospitality chains and ride-hailing platforms now run entire teams built for this single question. This career draws heavily on statistics and consumer-behaviour theory that most MBA students have already studied.

Sustainability and ESG strategy

As environmental governance reporting has moved from a compliance footnote to a priority, a new kind of role has emerged: professionals who build and oversee an organisation’s entire ESG strategy, including setting emissions targets, designing responsible sourcing policies, tracking governance standards across supply chains and preparing the necessary disclosures. The work involves long-term strategic thinking. It is a modern career track, barely a decade old in its current form, and one built on a kind of systems thinking that most management programmes teach.

Commercial and regulatory strategy

Another interesting career option sits at the intersection of management and law. Management graduates are being hired for roles focused on regulatory strategy and compliance risk. Large corporations like pharmaceutical companies, fintech companies, telecom companies and others need someone who can read a regulatory change and translate it into a business decision. This work has quietly become a management function. The people doing it are expected to judge whether a product, a partnership, or a market is worth the compliance risk it carries. It is a career built on reading fine print for its commercial consequences rather than its legal ones.

A wider landscape

Beyond these, management graduates have carved out careers in equally unexpected niches: insurance product design, disaster and humanitarian logistics, talent and royalty management in the music industry and behavioural research for public policy think tanks. Each of these draws on the same core management toolkit, applied somewhere few graduates think to look.

A career question

What unites these roles is the fact that each demands the same underlying capabilities: negotiation, resource allocation under constraint and functioning across teams. Management education builds exactly this kind of thinking that is relevant far beyond the handful of careers students typically picture for themselves. The more students look beyond the obvious paths, the more clearly they’ll see just how wide the field of management really is.

The writer is a Dean, Faculty of Management, SRMIST; Views presented are personal.