For aspiring business leaders, hard work pays off, sometimes even in the form of a fast track to the c-suite.
The leaders who will get there are in Fortune The most powerful rising executives list, a collection of 25 upcoming stars at Fortune 500 companies. But how they got to top positions at companies like Walmart, Amazon and Apple is not an easy story to tell, especially from an educational perspective.
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Others, on the other hand, took more traditional paths by studying business and economics in school and then getting one MBAothers pursued less popular paths, such as studying subjects such as physics, political science or pharmacology.
However, they have at least one thing in common: they all value education enough to earn a bachelor’s degree from universities of all sizes around the world. With the exception of the University of Michigan, where PepsiCo’s Ram Krishnan and Foot Locker’s Frank Bracken attended, the strongest Rising Executives went to special schools as graduates.
Fortune’s Rise of the Most Powerful Executives by Education Numbers:
- 100% have a bachelor’s degree
- 60% went to graduate school
- 40% have an MBA
- 16% attended an Ivy League
- 40% studied engineering or IT
Even the leaders did not attend to a great extent the schools that are considered the best of the best; only four of the leaders received a degree from an Ivy League school.
The most powerful executive promotions are not Leaders on Fortune’s Future 50 lista collection of companies best suited for long-term growth. Some company CEOs didn’t get a degree at all, saying it was a waste of time. On the other hand, others sought PhDs to become leaders in their fields.
A common denominator in both lists was the number of employers with degrees in subjects such as computer science and engineering. Both have a significant number of people who received their degree from outside the US
Undergraduate word cloud of Fortune’s most powerful rising executives.
However, the education of the most powerful rising executives is similar to that of Fortune 1000 CEOs, at least when it comes to MBAs. about 40% Fortune 1000 CEOs have a graduate degree in business.
