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Graduates throw their caps in the air after the official ceremony at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv on July 1. (Yaroslav Debelyi) But diploma from abroad is no guarantee of landing successful job in nation.

Alina Radionova, 24, received a degree in marketing in the Netherlands and two years later is flying high as business development manager at Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, the French luxury goods giant.

Ivan Verlan scored two foreign degrees by the age of 25, one of them a master of business administration from the prestigious INSEAD business school in Paris. He is now employed at Boston Consulting Group.

After an MBA at Hult International Business School in Boston, Olena Achkasova, 31, resumed her work in middle management at a fast-moving consumer goods company in Ukraine with no difference in salary or responsibility to her pre-MBA job.

While many Ukrainians universities lost their credibility with employers because of easily purchased grades and programs lagging behind market demands, more Ukrainians see Western educations as their ticket to higher paying jobs and quicker careers at home.



Alina Radionova

Carefully and thoroughly chosen foreign degrees do help, many recruiters and employers say, but they shouldn’t be taken as a guaranteed ticket to success.

“Hoping that you will receive a job in Ukraine just because you have a foreign degree is stupid,” said Tatiana Kucheruk, project manager at CareerGuide recruiting agency. “You should not expect an employer to pay you more just for a foreign diploma.”

But, of course, there are advantages.

“A master’s abroad usually helps to prepare you for a job in a specific, narrow field – something that would be hard to do in Ukraine where the education system is very generic,” said Alexandre De Raemaker, director of Diamond Recruiters.

“If combined with hard work, it could bring you to a better position quicker,” he added.

Radionova, who graduated from Rotterdam School of Management in 2009, is a case in point.

“We didn’t waste time on general courses like philosophy or cultural studies.

Our classes were very practical. In the brand management course, for example, we had 10 classes and 10 cases that we had to solve as a team. It was very much like what I did later on in my first job in L’Oreal luxury brands department,” she said.



Ivan Verlan

One year on, Radionova has changed her job at L’Oreal as junior brand manager for business development manager at Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy “earning better than others considering my work experience,” she said.

While her masters in marketing was financed by a grant from the Dutch government, she said she wanted to receive an MBA later on in her career and was ready to pay for it out of her own pocket.

“An MBA is a different story,” explained CareerGuide’s Kucheruk.

While MBAs are becoming more and more popular, there are a number of factors apart from high costs that a candidate should consider before deciding to embark on a course, such as time and energy spent, as well as uncollected salary and lost connections.

“In order to turn all those inputs into investments, one should clearly understand where one plans to work after an MBA and whether an employer needs a person with the skills that MBA gives,” said Kucheruk.

For Achkasova with an MBA in consulting thishas become a problem.

“My employer doesn’t care about my MBA,” she said.

Having won a scholarship that covered half of her $50,000 tuition fee for studying in Boston and Dubai she still had $25,000 of her school loan to pay back.



Alexandre De Raemaker

“Every month I pay $500 out of my salary to repay my loan and I can’t save anything. My biggest fear is that I’ll get sick and won’t be able to work,” she said, assessing her MBA experience as generally negative. Achkasova is disappointed in Ukraine and looking forward to finding a job abroad.

“If you decide to go for a full time MBA, choose top-10 in the U.S. or INSEAD. These established schools are always worth the effort,” said De Raemaker.

Verlan, who has recently started with Boston Consulting Group, said that in order to get into the top-notch companies one needs a top-notch degree, like from INSEAD.
For Verlan both of his foreign degrees worked to his advantage.

After graduating with a bachelor’s in international business from Saint Joseph University in the U.S. and spending one year at J.P. Morgan, he became senior consultant at PwC, one of the world’s so-called Big Four accounting and auditing firms, skipping a couple of years as an auditor that are usually required before taking up this post.

“Foreign degrees and working abroad allowed me to get ahead of the game. For my former colleagues in the U.S. it would take more years to be where I am now in Ukraine. Compared to my Ukrainian colleagues, I have the international experience advantage,” Verlan said.