From the point of view of admissions, every applicant offers a resume rife with titles, many of which are hard to translate to an MBA context. For more well-known industries or companies, it can be clearer where an applicant sits within the hierarchy of their organization, as there’s an obvious career path and progression. For example, if you’ve started out as an analyst in a consulting firm, there’s a broader awareness of the hierarchy of promotion and conventional timeframe. Then there are other organizations with less standard career tracks where it can be typical not to be promoted in three to four years.
But it’s difficult for admissions readers to discern for many other companies, “how important is this individual in their organization?” “Where does her department fit in?” The org chart question is a smart way to get to that; as an applicant, you don’t want to squander valuable essay real estate on explaining it.
With the introduction of the org chart requirement, MIT Sloan is really trying to get at the questions of what you do, who you report to, how close you are to the top and how you interact with other parts of the company or entity. It’s also about understanding the pace of your progression and your career path – how you’ve evolved over time, your level of influence, the significance of your promotions, and whether your movement has been horizontal or upwards. The org chart is a visual medium that provides admissions the context surrounding your achievements and professional position at a glance.
A client who worked for the economic development council for a major US city, in its strategy department. In his case, the option to submit an org chart might have vastly simplified his storytelling strategy. Instead, we had to think hard about how to succinctly convey his role within the city’s bureaucratic complexity. I remember asking him to walk me through the whole organizational chart, including his relationship to the mayor. Ultimately, he said: “We’re like the city’s internal SWAT team.” Which was a concise and brilliant ‘way in’ for us to articulate how he worked across various parts of the municipality and high level of decision-making influence he had at the city level.
That said, the org chart element can be tricky within a non-traditional organization. Another recent client was a senior engineer in a particular department at Apple, and frankly, her job title didn’t mean anything to someone outside of the organization. To complicate matters, Apple doesn’t publically publish its org chart, so it was up to her to convey where she existed within the company’s broader structure. Cumbersome as this may seem, this kind of mapping exercise can be invaluable for anyone looking to be a future industry leader.
