Abstract
This study investigates the determinants of MBA graduate employability within a labour market increasingly shaped by digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and sustainability imperatives. Although MBA programmes are frequently assessed based on career outcomes, limited empirical research has integrated graduate perceptions, employer expectations, skill-gap alignment, and contemporary curriculum relevance, including Generative AI (GenAI) and sustainability, within a single predictive framework. Moreover, prior large-scale studies, such as the 2024 report by the Association of MBAs (AMBA), have not disaggregated findings by continent and have examined postgraduate business education broadly rather than MBA programmes exclusively. This study addresses these gaps by focusing specifically on MBA stakeholders and incorporating geographic differentiation to better understand contextual variations in employability perceptions.
Adopting a multi-stakeholder design, the research combines quantitative survey data from MBA alumni with qualitative insights derived from interviews with employers, MBA academics, and current MBA students. This triangulated approach enables a comprehensive assessment of employability determinants across the principal actors influencing and experiencing MBA outcomes. The study develops and tests a structural model examining the relationships among graduate perceptions, perceived employer expectations, skill-gap alignment, contemporary curriculum relevance (including GenAI and sustainability integration), and self-reported employability.
Preliminary findings indicate that the structural model explains 62.9% of the variance in MBA graduate employability (R² = 0.629), demonstrating substantial explanatory power. Graduate perceptions of programme value and perceived employer expectations exhibit statistically significant positive relationships with employability outcomes. These findings underscore the importance of signalling effects, confidence formation, and alignment with market expectations in shaping employability perceptions. In contrast, skill-gap alignment and contemporary curriculum relevance, including the integration of GenAI and sustainability content, do not emerge as significant predictors within the model.
These results suggest that while curricular innovation in emerging domains remains strategically important, employability outcomes may be more strongly influenced by stakeholder perceptions and expectation alignment than by specific curricular components alone. The study contributes to the employability and management education literature by offering an integrated, continent-sensitive, MBA-focused framework and highlighting the relative importance of perceptual and relational factors in shaping graduate employability outcomes across diverse institutional contexts.