The technology industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. But it is also a rapidly changing one, with a high level of layoffs, disruptions, and uncertainty. Workers in the technology industry need to constantly keep up with the demand for new skills and knowledge.
Technology professionals often ask us at mbaMission how an MBA might help them advance in their career—or whether an MBA would be helpful at all. What are the top roles for MBAs in the technology industry? What are the benefits of pursuing a Tech MBA? What is the difference between a regular MBA and a Tech MBA program? With this blog post, we hope to provide you with some food for thought on this topic and help you understand how a Tech MBA might be advantageous for you professionally.
One of Canada’s top-ranked business schools for finance—the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management—was ranked first among Canadian MBA programs by the Financial Times in 2025. Rotman underwent significant growth under the six-year deanship of Tiff Macklem, a foremost figure in the nation’s financial sector, whose tenure saw a prominent rise in Rotman’s academic profile and its reputation for financial education. Macklem announced his plan to step down from his position in 2020 to take over as the governor of the Bank of Canada. However, his successor, Dean Susan Christoffersen, is no stranger to the field of finance herself. Before stepping in as dean, she helped build three finance-related programs at the school and the TD Management Data Analytics Lab, for which she also served as co-academic director.
This year, Harvard Business School (HBS) has retained its three concise and closely defined essay prompts, requiring applicants to submit a Business-Minded Essay, a Leadership-Focused Essay, and a Growth-Oriented Essay. With Round 2 application deadlines just around the corner, candidates are asking us what has been working for HBS applicants so far—as well as for advice on responding to the timeless and challenging prompt for the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB): “What matters most to you, and why?”
To help you write your essays for these programs, we at mbaMission have identified the top questions that applicants to these schools tend to ask us. We hope our ideas will provide food for thought and help you kick-start your HBS and Stanford GSB essays.
Although informal letters of recommendation or endorsement are not an essential part of the MBA application, if used strategically and appropriately, they can help you stand out from other candidates at your target business schools and differentiate you from similar applicants. But do not worry if you do not have an informal recommendation to submit. Again, business schools do not require them, and some even explicitly discourage them, so make sure to carefully read and follow any instructions on your target MBA programs’ websites and applications.
We believe that asking MBA candidates about their goals is plainly absurd, because so many students change their goals while they are in business school. Further, the pursuit of an MBA is supposed to be about career development and exploration, right? Regardless of how we feel regarding the subject, though, you must ensure that if a school asks about your goals in its essay questions or an interview, you have a compelling story about where you believe your MBA will take you. Several years ago, getting a banking job may have sounded compelling to you—are you really capable of making that transition today? Certainly, fewer jobs are available now in the real estate world—is this a likely next step for you during a prolonged real estate drought? Venture capital and private equity jobs are challenging to land even during the best of times—are you able to compete with the elite during a downturn?
These are just a few examples of questions you should honestly ask yourself. Keep in mind that not only are the admissions committees examining your story to determine what attributes you might bring to the next class, but if you are a borderline case, they may also send your profile to the career services office to help confirm whether your stated goals are realistic and if you will be difficult to place by or after graduation (i.e., whether you will hinder the school’s employment stats and thereby negatively affect its standing in the rankings). So, pay special attention to your goal statements and make sure that you can credibly stand behind them—and, as we have written in the past, even consider being prepared to discuss some alternate goals.
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