Business careers rarely follow a straight path. Technological changes, unpredictable economic conditions and shifting workplace expectations have transformed what it means to build a career in business, and a degree alone no longer guarantees advancement as it once did. What still matters is the ability to develop relevant skills as a role, an industry or an entire economy shifts beneath your feet. Lifelong learning can take place at various stages of a career, from an undergraduate degree that lays the foundations to postgraduate programmes that refine and expand on them later on.
Why business skills matter in a changing economy
Employers today value adaptability just as much as traditional business knowledge. Strategic thinking, clear communication, financial literacy, data analysis and leadership feature repeatedly in job adverts across all industries – not because they are trendy, but because they are transferable. A marketing manager who understands financial statements can more easily transition into a general management role. An operations manager who can present a data-driven case to directors becomes far more valuable than one who can merely execute a plan handed down from above. These are the skills that retain their value even as tools, platforms and job titles change.
Building a business foundation through undergraduate studies
For most professionals, an undergraduate degree is where this foundation is laid. Core courses in accounting, marketing, management and operations provide students with a working vocabulary of how companies actually function, upon which later specialisation is built. The Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, for example, offers a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration that allows students to specialise in finance, marketing, operations or organisational management, giving them the opportunity to explore the discipline that suits them best before committing to a specific path. Such a foundation does not need to be perfectly aligned with one’s future career path. It simply needs to be broad and solid enough to build upon.
When further education can support career progression
Advanced education – that is, further study – makes the most sense at certain turning points, not as an automatic step after a bachelor’s degree. Moving into management, changing industries, developing a specialism, consolidating strategic knowledge or preparing for a role with significantly greater responsibility are situations in which formal education can fill a real gap. Education alone, however, rarely does all the work. Experience, proven ability and continuous professional development matter just as much, and advanced education yields the best results when it reinforces what someone has already built through their work, rather than replacing it.
What an MBA can add to a professional’s skill set
The MBA is one of the common routes through which professionals pursue this kind of advancement, and its value usually lies in the breadth of its coverage. A well-structured programme covers strategic decision-making, leadership, finance, operations, communication and organisational management, often through case studies and real-life scenarios, rather than purely theoretical lectures. The full-time MBA at Harvard Business School is a well-known example of this format, built around general management and firmly rooted in practical application. Programmes of this kind illustrate what a traditional, on-campus MBA typically prioritises, even though this format is by no means the only option available.
Choosing the right format for your career goals
The right format depends largely on where you are in your career and what your life is like outside of work. Traditional, on-campus programmes offer an immersive experience and a network that is difficult to replicate elsewhere, but they usually require taking a break from a full-time job. The timetable, specialisation options, depth of the curriculum, accreditation, cost and relevance to a specific career path all factor into the decision. For working professionals who cannot or do not wish to put their careers on hold, online programmes have become a truly comparable option, not just a fallback solution, especially as more and more established institutions have developed formats specifically designed for working adults.
The online MBA as a flexible path forward
Professionals considering advanced business education often seek a format that provides postgraduate training without putting their career on hold. An online MBA can offer precisely this flexibility: students can continue to work whilst taking courses according to a timetable that fits in with their existing commitments. GCU’s online MBA programme is a prime example, offering several specialisations, including business analysis, marketing, finance and project management, which allow students to tailor their degree more closely to their chosen career path. For many working professionals, the combination of flexibility and specialisation makes the online format a serious alternative to traditional programmes.
Continuing education as part of a long-term career strategy
Formal education need not be the final step in anyone’s professional development. Certifications, keeping up to date with industry developments, building a solid professional network, finding mentors and simply gaining practical experience all complement a degree, rather than replacing it. The professionals who stand to gain the most from continuing education are those who choose it deliberately, based on where they truly want to go, rather than treating qualifications as something to collect for their own sake.
As economic conditions continue to change, adaptability is likely to remain one of the most valuable traits of a business professional. Advanced business education is a tool for building this adaptability, particularly when combined with real-world practical experience, rather than treated as a substitute for it. For anyone weighing up their next move, a useful starting point is an honest assessment of their current skills and an evaluation of where further education could genuinely support the next step.
The protean career: who is responsible for a path that is no longer straight?
The opening sentence of the article – ‘careers no longer follow a straight line’ – has its origins in management literature. In 1976, Douglas T. Hall, a professor at Boston University, published *Careers in Organisations* and coined the term ‘protean career’, after the god who changed his form. It is a career driven by the individual, not the organisation, measured in terms of psychological success, not hierarchical rungs. It is built from a succession of short learning cycles, not from a single upward climb. A quarter of a century later, in 2004, Hall noted in the *Journal of Vocational Behaviour* that the idea had, in the meantime, become the implicit description of the labour market.
Read through Hall’s lens, the above article serves as a guide to managing a multifaceted career. The turning points at which education makes sense are the transitions between learning cycles. The insistence that education alone does not do all the work is the very definition of psychological success: what matters is what you know how to do, not what is written on your degree certificate. And the warning against collecting qualifications for their own sake is precisely the criticism Hall levelled at the old organisational career model, in which titles took the place of competence. The difference from 1976 is that, back then, the protean career was a choice; today it is the starting point. A Hall cycle lasts several years and has four phases: exploration, trial, mastery, and plateau. The advanced education discussed in the article naturally comes at the start of a new cycle, when mastery of the old one has reached a plateau. Anyone who purchases it in the middle of a cycle, out of impatience, is paying for skills they do not yet have the opportunity to use. The right moment is easy to recognise: your current job is no longer teaching you anything new.
The theory has its limitations, as pointed out by its critics and, in part, by Hall himself. It is more prescriptive than descriptive, and the empirical evidence that a protean approach yields better results remains mixed. It shifts onto the individual a risk that organisations previously bore, with pensions, predictable promotions and paid training, and those with few resources have less to gain from the freedom to change their form. It remains, however, the clearest description of what the article demands without actually saying so: if no one is responsible for your path any more, you are responsible for it yourself – including the aspects the article does not address.
The independent professional must be recognisable to outsiders
The old organisational career had an advantage that the versatile one has lost: those who knew you knew your worth. A professional who changes industry with every cycle finds themselves, each time, facing strangers. They can only judge them once they have verified their credentials. Qualifications, certifications and experience are all merely claims until someone confirms them at source, and employers are doing this ever more systematically, through academic verification services and the registers of the bodies that issue certifications. In a protean career, transparency is not vanity, but infrastructure. In the United States, academic verification usually goes through a central register of institutions, where employers request confirmation of the degree directly from the institution, not from the candidate. A scanned degree in a CV no longer convinces anyone; an entry in the register does. Anyone who changes their career path at every stage therefore needs each stage to be verifiable.
The figures show why the importance of verification increases with the level of qualification. In May 2025, the US Bureau of Labour Statistics reported, for the year 2024, a median weekly earnings figure of $1,840 for master’s degree holders, compared with $1,543 for those with a bachelor’s degree. The unemployment rate stood at 2.2 per cent, compared with 2.5 per cent. These figures represent correlations, not evidence of causation. The difference varies greatly depending on the field and on who chooses to continue their studies – what economists have for decades referred to as the ‘skill bias’. Even so, a pay premium of nearly $300 a week explains why a degree is so frequently cited and why it is increasingly being verified.
Verification works both ways, and the article implicitly requires it when it lists accreditation amongst the selection criteria. A programme is verified in the same way as any service that is difficult to assess in advance. Existence and classification come first: the institution exists, has a fixed address and contact details, and is genuinely active in the field stated. An editorial category of professional training and development providers, in which every entry has been verified by a human before publication, answers this question. It claims no more than that. Next comes accreditation, confirmed in the register of the body that granted it – not by the logo on the website – whilst paying attention to the difference between institutional accreditation and programme accreditation, as a programme may hold one without the other. The online programme mentioned in the article, for example, holds the university’s regional institutional accreditation and programme accreditation for most specialisations, but not for all – a detail that can only be seen in the register. Only then do the cost, timetable and specialisation options matter.
A new risk arises precisely at the research stage. More and more applicants are asking a chatbot which programme to choose, and systems that piece together answers from programme description pages can blithely repeat a non-existent accreditation or invent a programme with a plausible name. The mechanism is described in an analysis of directories as anchors of trust against AI hallucinations: a generated response is only as good as the verified sources it draws upon, and the only defence is the requirement that every statement carries a reference that can be checked. For a candidate, the rule translates simply: credibility is verified in the register, not in the machine’s response.
The decision to learn is an investment decision, with all that this entails
In conclusion, the article calls for an honest assessment of one’s current abilities. This assessment takes the form of an investment analysis: cost, return, risk, and time horizon. The cost of a programme includes fees, but also the time taken away from your current career. The return is the income premium mentioned above, weighted by the field. The risk is the chance that the next stage of your career will require something other than what you have learnt. The time horizon is the most commonly overlooked factor: a degree taken at the age of 45 has a different payback period than one taken at 28. The way in which such choices are set out on paper, with reward and risk weighed against one another, is described in an analysis of risk and reward assessment in life and investment decisions, and its conclusion ties in with this article: a degree is chosen as an investment, not as a talisman.
For many of those considering a business education, the next step is not another employer but their own company, and there, credibility takes on a concrete form: the company must be found and trusted by outsiders, using the same tools an employer uses to vet a candidate. A curated list of verified small businesses sets the standard: name, address, sector and description are identical across all sources, and verified by a human before publication. The entrepreneur who learnt to read a market whilst studying for an MBA often discovers, upon launch, that their own company is not visible within it.
The same discipline applies to those seeking a job. For a candidate, recruiters and employment agencies are service providers like any others, and an editorial category dedicated to recruitment and employment services carries out the initial check – verifying the company’s existence – before the one that really matters: checking references by name and reviewing the contract. And the candidate’s own details – their degree, qualifications and employment history – must match across all public sources. A rushed recruiter compares three profiles in the space of an hour. Why accurate listings matter to a firm has been extensively documented, and for a versatile professional the argument is the same, on an individual level: a discrepancy between two sources is spotted in a minute and decides the outcome in the next. The test is carried out once a year, at the start of each new cycle: the candidate searches for themselves as a recruiter from another industry would and corrects any inconsistencies.
What no level of verification can do must be stated just as clearly. An editorially verified listing confirms that a school, firm or agency exists, that it can be contacted, that it operates in the category shown, and that it can still be found a year later. It does not certify a qualification, does not guarantee the quality of a programme, and does not replace accreditation registers, discussions with graduates, or the experience that the article quite rightly places alongside any qualification. Verification at source takes one evening per cycle; a qualification bought from the wrong institution lasts a lifetime on a CV. Each layer answers a different question. And, in Hall’s terms, together they perform the task that no organisation does on the professional’s behalf any more: keeping it legible to outsiders, cycle after cycle.
