For aspiring business leaders, hard work pays off, sometimes even in the form of a fast track to the CEO position.
The leaders most likely to get there are on Fortune’s list of Most Powerful Rising CEOs, a collection of 25 rising stars at Fortune 500 companies. But how they reached 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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While some took more traditional routes to study business and economics at school and later earned an MBA, others took less popular routes, 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 bachelor’s degrees 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 studied — all of the most influential rising CEOs attended unique schools as undergraduates.
Educating Fortune’s Most Powerful Rising CEOs in Numbers:
- 100% have a bachelor’s degree
- 60% enrolled in postgraduate studies
- 40% have an MBA
- 16% attended the Ivy League
- 40% studied engineering or computer science
Leaders also largely did not attend schools that were generally considered the best of the best; Only four of the leaders earned a degree from an Ivy League school.
The most powerful rising CEOs stand out from the leaders on Fortune’s Future 50 list, a group of companies best suited for long-term growth. Some corporate CEOs never get any certification at all, considering it a waste of time. On the other hand, others pursued doctoral degrees to be leaders in their fields.
On both lists, one thing in common was the number of business leaders with degrees in subjects such as computer science and engineering. Both also have a large number of individuals who earned a degree outside the United States
A word cloud of college majors for Fortune’s most powerful rising CEOs.
However, the education of the most powerful rising executives is very similar to that of Fortune 1000 CEOs, at least in terms of an MBA degree. About 40% of Fortune 1000 CEOs have a graduate degree in business administration.