New Identified Research Reveals Engineers Far More Likely than MBAs to Build and Run Companies

In our latest edition of the “Revenge of the Nerds” white paper research series, Identified has discovered that a growing number of company founders and CEOs today are far more likely to hold advanced engineering degrees than MBAs and that the overall age of business leaders is steadily trending downward. We see this shift as a significant impact on corporate culture with younger, more technically inclined entrepreneurs at the helm.

We culled through 36 million professional profiles in the Identified database and found 3,337 founder/CEOs have an advanced engineering background compared with 1,016 MBAs. The ratio of undergrad business and engineering founders/ CEOs is about even (9,461 versus 9,334), a significant shift occurs in the number of leaders who have advanced degrees.

Founders are also getting younger, with the average age dropping to around 33 years old from 36 in 2008, based on an analysis of Facebook profile data, 90 percent of which is US based.

The ‘nerd-inspiring’ success story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a possible foundation for more engineers launching new endeavors, particularly in the IT, social and mobile industries.

Our study tracked the Identified Scores of engineers to discover where some of the top talent could be found studying. International programs such as the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Canada’s University of Waterloo and China’s Tsinghua University joined the list of usual suspects like Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CalTech and Carnegie Mellon.

To Download the full report, please click here.

Comments

[Greg Kostrikin]

One needs to look at the underlying reasons for taking on MBA vs Engineering route to figure out causality. Statistics alone wouldn't paint the whole picture in this case. Split at the undergrad level hints at that.

[Darren]

This is not surprising considering most product inventions are done by engineers who go on to start up companies that later get over run by marketing and business professionals.

[Abhishek D]

That's to be expected. An MBA degree is one BIG SCAM.

Merely some cost accounting, some marketing jargon, and some "business ethics" do not a businessman make.

[FOS]

Are their more engineers than MBAs? Is there a way to normalize. I still think this is awesome! I'm taking a mixed engineering/mba class right now and I'm not gonna say we have a better idea of how to run a business but we have better ideas on how to start one! (we being engineers)

[Davide 'Folletto' Casali]

Could you dig deeper please?

Absolute numbers here are quite meaningless: how many engineers in percentage of the total number of engineers do that? That will tell something, since I expect engineers to be more than MBAs. :)

For example, if there are 9 times more engineers than MBA graduates, and being the ration here 1/3, it means that it's three times more likely to become a CEO as an MBA graduate than an engineer one. ;)

I know it makes a good story a title like that... but it will be even nicer if it was coming from a deeper analysis, right? :)

[Harper]

Some engineers (like me) get MBAs. Engineers often make up 1/3 of the class at top MBA programs.

[Vaya]

I agree completly. Getting a degree is such a waste of time and money. While you were getting your degree, I was building my company.

We don't hire degrees. We hire experience, and skill. The degrees generally have ego problems, expect to be paid too much, and have no real world experience.

Where as those who are good at what they do, expect to prove that they are worth what they want to be paid. And I pay them that much. Because they are good at what they do. They are humble, and over all smarter.

Smarter?
Anyone who unwisely spends $100,000 and six years of their life on a useless degree is a liability. I need people with common sense.

Those who looked at the job market, realized they could get a job without a degree, and went to work, are not only six years ahead in their careers, but they show that I can trust them in situations where common sense is needed.

[Greg Coladonato]

In order to make sense of this analysis, I would need to know the size of the 4 populations: # of undergrad business majors in your dataset, # of undergrad eng, # of grad eng, # of MBA. For example, if there are onlt 1016 MBAs in your whole population, it would mean that 100% of MBAs become CEOs, which is much more interesting than just knowing an absolute number. (I'm sure you have more than 1016 MBAs in your analysis, but my point is, without the denominators, these numerators aren't as useful).

Thanks for the report,
Greg

p.s. I think the pie charts would be more easily understandable if you didn't flip the Engineering category from bottom to top position, and if you used the same colors for the two categories in the two pie charts.

[viviane vincenzi]

Revenge of
the neRds!

[John Hunter]

I would be very interested to see this data when only looking at S&P 500 companies (or some other such limited set of organizations). It is interesting as it is. But it would be interesting to see the makeup of the largest company CEO's. I would expect engineers to still lead (based on other data I have seen). But that data is starting to be a few years old.