For ambitious business leaders, hard work pays off, sometimes in the form of rapid promotions to top management.
Fortune’s Most Influential Emerging Executives list, a compilation of 25 rising stars at Fortune 500 companies, includes leaders who have the potential to rise to the position. But it’s not easy to tell how they rose to high positions at companies like Walmart, Amazon, and Apple. This is especially true from an educational perspective.
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Some have taken a more traditional route, such as studying business and economics at school and later earning an MBA, while others have chosen less popular routes, such as studying subjects such as physics, political science and pharmacology.
But they have at least one thing in common. They all value education enough to earn bachelor’s degrees from universities of all sizes around the world. With the exception of the University of Michigan studied by PepsiCo’s Ram Krishnan and Foot Locker’s Frank Bracken, the most influential rising executives all attended unique schools as undergraduates.
Education of Fortune’s Most Influential Emerging Executives by the Numbers:
- 100% bachelor’s degree holders
- 60% go on to graduate school
- 40% have an MBA degree.
- 16% attended an Ivy League school.
- 40% studied engineering or computer science.
The leaders also did not attend schools that were generally considered the best of the best. Only four of the leaders have degrees from Ivy League schools.
The strongest emerging executives are different from the leaders included on Fortune’s Future 50 list, a collection of companies best positioned for long-term growth. Some CEOs of these companies never obtained a degree, saying it was a waste of time. On the other hand, others have sought a PhD to become leaders in their fields.
One thing both lists had in common was the number of business leaders with degrees in fields such as computer science and engineering. Both schools have significant numbers of individuals who earned their degrees outside the United States.
A word cloud of the undergraduate majors of Fortune’s most powerful rising executives.
But the education of the most influential emerging executives is broadly similar to that of Fortune 1000 CEOs, at least in terms of their MBAs. About 40% of Fortune 1000 CEOs have a business school degree.
