One of the most common questions we get asked is how to explain a career break or gap year in an MBA application. There can be a lot of reasons why you might need to take some time out of your career – maybe you’re taking care to reassess your career path, maybe you’re going back to school to get a higher degree, or maybe you’re just taking a break to travel or pursue a personal project.
If you’ve taken a break from your career—whether it’s for a gap year, sabbatical, or any other reason—you may be wondering how it will affect your MBA application.
The good news is that most MBA programs are designed for working professionals, so a career break or gap year is unlikely to hurt your application. In fact, many MBA programs encourage applicants to take a break from their careers in order to gain new skills and experiences.
However, your MBA application will need to justify your career break or gap year. Be honest about the justification for it. Don’t try to hide your career break or gap year; admissions committees will likely be able to tell if you’re being truthful.
You can also highlight what you have accomplished during your career gap.
Whatever the reason, it’s important to be upfront about it in your application. The admissions committee needs to see that you have a clear plan for how you have used your time off and that you’re still committed to your career goals.
A gap of 2-3 months is considered normal but more than 6 months or year surely raises a red flag in the recruiter’s point of view. People often take a break either intentionally or because of some personal reasons. But how to address this gap in your resume is a big question.
Few MBA applicants settle on a gap year to evaluate and adjust their personal, professional, or even academic objectives. In this way, it is reasonable to show a gap year as a growth opportunity that includes a reassessment as well as useful and significant work that creates individual and scholarly progress. This break can add to expanding one’s perspective, getting work insight or acquiring new abilities, or testing yourself by getting out of your usual range of familiarity.
Hence, business schools don’t always consider a gap year to be a negative choice, except if it isn’t displayed in the proper manner. This is the place where the Statement of Purpose (SOP) and Application Essays goes about as a type of formal presentation that assists business schools to understand the student’s motivations and career goals.
The secret to tending to career gaps is being genuine and straightforward about the break and showing how it adds to an applicant’s development or learning. In this way, it is vital to offer substantial evidence like skills developed or career achievements that justifies it. Therefore, showing substantial positive encounters with a career gap will separate these applicants from the others since it demonstrates their readiness to pursue and accomplish their objectives.
For example, applicants can feature gap year exercises like getting ready for cutthroat examinations like the GMAT, GRE, EA etc. Business schools are very much aware of the degree of challenge these examinations present on them, and the sort of time and exertion should be put to get ready and prevail in a cutthroat assessment for a particular field of study. Commitment towards something that one is enthusiastic about is generally seen as a positive point, since it’s a sign of a holistic, multi-layered individual. Even travel represents one such angle as long as applicants have encounters like satisfying individual objectives or extending networks to grandstand, which features the positive impact.
Moreover, with the growing enthusiasm to make, own and maintain a business, pioneering endeavors are generally viewed as achievements, since it features the core critical thinking through proactive endeavors. Besides, even personal problems like financial hurdles or medical exigencies should be clarified through an SOP with sufficient supporting evidence for the same.
Academic gaps because of skill advancement works for the candidates. In such cases, referencing the upskilling program, the reasoning for choosing the discipline alongside the certificate of completion need to be shared. Improving core abilities highlights one’s eagerness to master new things, as a practice. This mirrors the applicant’s obligation to ceaseless learning, through different channels.
In case of an academic break because of work, applicants should bring out how they added to expanding their minds about the work and how it assisted them with getting to know the inner functions of an organization. Moreover, it can likewise be considered as a marker to developing one’s professional network. However, in case the student has not been working during this break, they need to guarantee that they feature some activities that prompted curiosity levels in a specific field of study. Preferably, this ought to be the very field of study that they anticipate deciding on at the college.