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We at mbaMission try to encourage business school candidates to get as much “noise” out of the way as possible before they begin working on their official application(s) and essays, even several months in advance. We want applicants to have the freedom to reflect on their experiences, formally and thoroughly brainstorm, choose ideas, prepare outlines, and then focus on crafting powerful essays. Essentially, we want them to be unfettered as they engage in what is, for many, one of the most significant creative challenges they will ever face.

Present Both Responsibilities and Results

In your MBA resume, be sure to showcase your accomplishments, rather than merely stating the responsibilities of your position. When your responsibilities are presented with no accompanying results, the reader has no understanding of whether you were effective in the role you are describing. For example, consider the following entry, in which only responsibilities are offered:

2023–Present Household Products Group, Flocter & Gramble Cincinnati, Ohio

Brand Manager

• Responsible for managing a $10M media campaign, supervising a staff of five junior brand managers, monitoring daily sales volumes, and ensuring the consistent supply of product from five production facilities in three countries.

The reader is left wondering, “Was the media campaign successful? Did the staff of five progress? Did sales volumes increase? Did the supply of products reach its destination?” When this one long bullet point is instead broken down into individual bulleted entries that elaborate on each task and show clear results, the reader learns not just about the candidate’s responsibilities but also about that person’s ultimate effectiveness and successes.

2023–Present Flocter & Gramble Cincinnati, Ohio

Brand Manager

• Initiated $10M television/Internet “Island Vacation” promotion introducing new Shine brand detergent, surpassing first-year sales targets within three months.
• Mentored and supervised five junior brand managers, each of whom was promoted to brand manager (company traditionally promotes 25%).
• Analyzed daily sales volumes and identified opportunity to increase price point in Midwest, resulting in 26% margin improvement and $35M in new profits.
• Secured “safety supply” of vital chemicals from alternate suppliers, ensuring 99% order fulfillment.

By comparing the first entry with the second, you can see how much more effective an accomplishment-driven resume is than one that simply lists responsibilities.

Demonstrate Nonquantifiable Results

Presenting quantifiable results in your resume is preferred because such results clearly convey your success in the actions you undertook. However, in some instances, you simply cannot quantify your success. In such cases, you can instead demonstrate nonquantifiable or even potential results. Consider the following examples:

• Persuaded management to review existing operations; currently leading Manufacturing Review Committee, which will table its final report in August 2025.
• Established divisional continuing education series, noted on review as “crucial” and “game changing.”
• Initiated biweekly “Tuesday at Five” team social event, resulting in enhanced workplace morale.

In each of these bullet points, the results of the writer’s actions are not measurable, but they are nonetheless important. The accomplishments, while “soft,” are conveyed as clearly positive.

Keep It Concise

Ideally, your resume should be only one page long; admissions committees generally expect and appreciate the conciseness of this format. If you choose to submit a resume consisting of two pages or more, your reader may have difficulty scanning it and identifying (and remembering) important facts. With these space constraints in mind, we offer two fairly straightforward “space saver” ideas:

• Do not include a mission statement at the beginning of your resume. Your mission in this case is to get into the MBA program to which you are applying—and, of course, the admissions committee already knows this! A mission statement will take up precious space that can be used more effectively for other purposes.
• Your address should take up no more than one line of your resume. Many applicants will “stack” their address, using four, five, or even six lines, as if they were writing an address on an envelope. Consider how much space an address occupies when presented in the following format:

Ms. X
123 Y Street
1st Floor
City, State 10001
646-111-2222
x@y.com

You just wasted five lines of real estate! To help whittle your resume down to one page, try putting your address on just one line so you can save five others for valuable bullets.

And, while we are discussing the document’s length, resist the urge to shrink your font or margins to make your resume fit on one page. Your font should be no smaller than ten-point type, and your margins should be no smaller than 1″ on either side and 0.75″ at the top and bottom. Rather than trying to squeeze too much information onto the page, commit yourself to showcasing only your most important accomplishments that tell your story best.

If you want to go to business school but are not coming from a “traditional” background in consulting or finance, you might be worried that you will not be accepted to a top MBA program. Maybe you are a teacher, an athlete, or a journalist. Perhaps you are in the military or have a background as a chef. Nontraditional applicants like you are different, and believe it or not, admissions directors love that!

If you are a nontraditional MBA applicant, here are a few tips to help you navigate the application process and give you some confidence about your candidacy.

1. Do not try to be something you are not.

Although a large percentage MBA applicants come from finance and consulting, your unique background helps you stand out. Highlight what you are good at, and showcase accomplishments you have had in your field. No professor wants to be in front of a class that is made up entirely of bankers and consultants. Your experience adds diversity to the class and allows you to look at situations from a different perspective than that of others. Emphasize your distinctiveness!

Need more proof? Every year, schools release their Class Profiles, in which they present a breakdown of incoming students’ statistics and pre-MBA backgrounds. According to Harvard Business School’s most recent class profile, for example, the program drew 42% of its Class of 2026 from consulting (18%), financial services (10%), and venture capital/private equity (16%). That means that the rest of the students in the class (58%) came from other industries, including technology, military service, consumer products/retail/e-commerce, healthcare/biotech, and nonprofits. 

In addition, the incoming HBS students’ college majors vary widely. While 24% were business and commerce majors, 22% were engineering majors, 19% were economics majors, and 18% majored in math/physical sciences. Rounding out the class are individuals who majored in social science (12%) and arts/humanities (5%).

When you look at the numbers this way, “nontraditional” suddenly looks pretty traditional.

2. Showcase your quantitative or analytical skills.

Business schools want you to succeed, and to succeed, you need to be able to handle the rigor of the MBA program. Most schools require heavy quantitative and analytical work, especially in classes such as “Corporate Finance,” “Statistics,” and “Data Analytics.” Even if such skills are not a major part of your work experience, showing the admissions committee that you can manage the quantitative demands of an MBA program is crucial. 

One way to do that is by performing well on your standardized test. A strong quantitative performance on the GMAT, GRE, or Executive Assessment can help prove that you are ready for MBA academics. You can also build an alternative transcript by taking quant-focused courses, such as HBS CORe or MBA Math, or a college class in statistics or economics. 

Also, look for opportunities to showcase your experiences. For example, a recent applicant who worked for a TV station had little quant experience. However, she analyzed the station’s social media impressions, which led to some programming changes and ultimately resulted in a boost in advertising sales. That story became an important part of her applications! 

3. Be clear about why you want an MBA and where it will lead you.

The good news if you are a nontraditional applicant is that you most likely do not have an undergraduate degree in business, so your reasons for needing an MBA are easy to establish in your applications. Still, articulating career goals that make sense for your specific background and skill set is important, meaning you want the admissions committee to feel confident that you will get a job after business school without a struggle. For example, a client who worked as a chef and TV food stylist built her career goals on moving into consumer products marketing, with a focus on food. This path made perfect sense to the admissions committee.

Striving to make a major career change during your MBA studies is not just okay, it is actually quite common. And if that is your plan, you need to think about the skills you have built in your career thus far that could easily carry over into your future career. 

4. Highlight your best traits.

As a nontraditional applicant, you bring different experiences and skills to the table than others in the class, and that is something the schools like! Think about what sets you apart and how you can highlight these qualities in your applications.

For example, almost every career requires teamwork, so make sure that the admissions committee knows how well you work in a group or team setting. Think about your experiences in your work environment and extracurricular activities, and tell stories about times you have engaged positively and productively with others. For example, a teacher might write about how they collaborated with fellow staff members to develop programming that raised students’ test scores school-wide.

Another thing that might set you apart is your global experience. Business schools love to see applicants who have broad outlooks and perspectives, and who relish working alongside people who are different from them. Consider highlighting international opportunities and exposure you have had, whether via working abroad or on teams with members located around the world, and share how those experiences have enriched you.If you have questions about your nontraditional background or wonder which schools you would be competitive at, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with an mbaMission Consultant.

In your pursuit of acceptance to business school, you are competing against thousands of other applicants. Because you do not actually know these individuals, you may naturally assume that you need any and every edge available to stand out. As a result, you may feel compelled to provide every single detail of your life, exploiting your resume in particular to do so. We want you to maximize your opportunities, of course, but we also want to be sure you do not jeopardize your application by offering too much information.

Our experience has shown that many resumes—especially those in which every margin is narrowed and every font is made smaller—provide a detrimental surplus of detail. Some become so dense with text that rather than being easily scannable, which is the ideal, they are entirely impenetrable and therefore easy to ignore. We often tell clients that “less is more,” explaining that a brief resume that will be read in full is more beneficial than a dense resume that will not get read at all. At an Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants Conference, eight leading admissions officers were asked whether they would prefer a one-page or two-page resume, and one person led all the others in declaring, “Everyone together… one page!”

Even with a one-page resume, however, you need to understand what is useful to include and what should be excluded. The answer to this riddle is different for everyone. You may consider jettisoning internships from years gone by, for example, or reducing the number of bullet points offered for past jobs. Eliminating entries for community involvements from long ago could be helpful. The agenda for your resume should be to create maximum impact, and sometimes that is achieved by using fewer words and bullet points. You may need to make tough choices, but the time and effort will be well spent if you ultimately submit a stronger resume and thereby make a more compelling statement about yourself.

We’ve discussed observing limits with your resume. Now, we take a similar approach with your essays—in particular, your goals essay. Some business schools ask applicants to discuss their career progress first in a classic goals essay:

Briefly asses your career progress to date. Elaborate on your future career plans and your motivation for pursuing an MBA.

Whereas other schools do not request any professional context:

What are your short-term and long-term post-MBA goals? How will our school help you achieve these goals?

Applicants tend to seize on these broad, open-ended questions as opportunities to discuss their entire career history in depth, offering far more than mere context for their goals. In response to a question like the first one here, some candidates will mistakenly use 75% or more of the word space provided just discussing their career progression to date. Although this may seem “brief” to you, the truth is that focusing so extensively on your past minimizes your opportunity to discuss other crucial aspects of your candidacy.

If you devote too much of your essay to detailing your past career progress, you will be unable to thoroughly address your reasons for wanting an MBA and your interest in the school. Providing context for your goals by giving an overview of your professional life to date is unquestionably important, but you must be sure to balance the different sections of your essay. Clearly conveying your goals and your reasons for choosing a particular school is crucial so that you connect with your target, rather than miss it entirely.