How Many Years of Work Experience Do You Need Before an MBA?

People applying to business school often reach out to me with questions. The number one question by a wide margin is "how did you prepare for the GMAT?". I wrote this to answer that.

Recently, I have been seeing an increase in people asking how many years of experience I think they should have before applying to MBA programs. While I enjoy meeting new people, I thought writing and sharing my answer would be more efficient. I put it on Medium so it is easier for people who don't know me to discover it.

My answer is somewhere between three to five years.

Here's a link to the full post.

INSEAD Africa Business Conference 2018 - Harnessing Africa's Potential: From Ideas to Action

Participants during networking cocktails at the INSEAD Africa Business Conference 2018

Nigeria does not generate enough electricity to power the country around the clock and providing your own power is expensive, so many retailers cannot refrigerate products overnight. As a result, dairy products such as yoghurts cycle between chilled and warm states repeatedly before they are sold. This sometimes causes yoghurts to go bad, as I often found out to my horror as a child.

So, what do you do when you’re Danone and you’re looking to sell your yoghurts in Cameroon? You have to reformulate it. You can’t just sell the same formulations that work in France. You have to design something specifically for your target market in Africa.