Doctoral degrees are often mere accessories

Dieter Zetsche and Johannes Teyssen have done it, Kurt Bock and Reinhard Ploss have done it as well: All four chairmen of the DAX companies Daimler, E.ON, BASF and Infineon have obtained a doctorate. Is a doctorate necessary in order to get to the top? The answer is no. Experts differ in their assessments of the career benefits such a title provides. Many take it for a helpful, but not a mandatory career building block and certainly not for an entry ticket into top management positions.

International corporations also value applicants with an MBA which is comparable to international degrees. However, Björn Knothe, CEO of division one, a recruitment consultancy firm based in Stuttgart, points to an opaque market with more than 10,000 MBA programs worldwide that impart management knowledge in varying degrees of quality. “Companies have difficulties in appraising the quality of the respective degrees. Therefore, the university’s renown serves as a means of orientation,” Knothe points out. As there are so many bearers of titles, companies find it difficult to assess those titles‘ significance altogether.

(available only in German)

(Source: Wirtschaftszeitung Baden-Württemberg/ Issue 01/2016 / Stefanie Köhler)