Is an Executive MBA Really Worth It When You Already Have 10 Years of Experience?
- Jul 17
- 6 min read
A conversation with Heena Mehta, Global Talent Leader (ex-Google, ex-Meta), on why the ROI question is the wrong first question
There is a moment in almost every senior professional's career when the same question surfaces: should I go back to school? Not for a first job, not to build a foundation, but to reposition for the next decade. The instinct that follows is almost always financial. What is the ROI of an Executive MBA? Will the salary jump justify the tuition, the travel, the weekends lost?
Ms. Heena Mehta has spent close to a decade building and scaling talent functions at Google, Meta, Collabora, and now Project44, across India, APAC, Europe, Japan, China, and the US. She has sat on both sides of this decision, as the person evaluating candidates' credentials, and, right now, as a candidate herself, midway through the International Executive Master's in Business (IEMB) at SDA Bocconi. That dual vantage point is what makes her perspective on the executive education question worth pausing on.
Her answer, in short: the ROI question, framed as salary math, is the wrong question entirely.
The degree-versus-skill debate is already over
For years, the conversation in Indian professional circles has been framed as degrees versus skills, as if a candidate must pick a side. Ms. Mehta rejects the framing outright. The professionals who actually get ahead, she argues, are the ones who blend both: credentials that signal commitment and structured learning, paired with the ability to convert that learning into visible business impact.
This distinction matters more, not less, as AI compresses the value of information itself. When anyone can retrieve facts instantly, the differentiator shifts to judgment, critical thinking, adaptability, and execution, the very capabilities a degree alone cannot certify but a well-chosen program can accelerate.
For applicants building a case for an executive program, this is the first reframe worth internalizing: the essay, the interview, the entire admissions narrative should not be built around "I want a degree." It should be built around the specific judgment gap the candidate is trying to close.
The real Executive MBA ROI is capability, not compensation
Ms. Mehta is direct about what she tells senior professionals who ask her about ROI: it is the capability to take on more responsibility, not the size of the next paycheck. This lines up with what the broader research on executive education is now showing. Industry data on MBA ROI increasingly emphasizes that the value of the degree is less about what is learned and more about who is met, how quickly the graduate advances, and which doors the credential opens, a reminder that compensation is a lagging indicator, not the mechanism of value itself.
That said, the compensation data is not irrelevant, and applicants should know it. The Executive MBA Council's 2024 figures show average total compensation for EMBA participants rising from roughly $203,000 to $244,000 during the program, a near-20% increase, though outcomes vary sharply by seniority and geography. For professionals with 15 or more years of experience specifically, longer-horizon data suggests five-year post-graduation income growth in the range of 50 to 80 percent for EMBA graduates, but that number tells you almost nothing about why it happens. It happens because the degree changes the seat the person sits in, not because the certificate itself carries a price tag.
Why functional experts plateau after 10 years of their career?
One of the sharper points Ms. Mehta makes concerns what she has watched happen to specialists. Early in a career, becoming a subject-matter expert is the right move. But organizations eventually expect something broader: a working fluency in finance, operations, strategy, innovation, and customer impact, even for someone who has spent a decade purely in one function, such as talent acquisition.
This is precisely the gap executive education is designed to close, not by replacing functional depth, but by adding a business-leadership lens on top of it. Ms. Mehta describes sitting in a corporate strategy class where the entire cohort, coming from a dozen different industries, arrived at the same realization: professionals instinctively jump to solutions, and the discipline of stepping back to gather ideas and ideate collectively was itself the education. That is not a lesson a textbook delivers. It is a lesson peer diversity delivers, which is why she is emphatic that the value of an executive program lives as much in the classroom's composition as in the faculty's curriculum.
This has a direct implication for how a candidate should write their executive MBA application: reviewers are not simply testing whether a candidate can absorb a strategy framework. They are testing whether the candidate has identified, honestly, where their current expertise stops being sufficient, and whether the specific program's cohort and format will close that gap faster than tenure alone would.
What is the mistake ambitious professionals make?
Asked what she sees as the most common misstep among people trying to future-proof their careers, Ms. Mehta names two. First, the assumption that experience alone guarantees continued relevance: a decade of tenure means little if a person has not kept pace with tools like AI that can just as easily make someone dispensable. Second, the trap of "waiting to be told": the strongest professionals do not need a KRA or a company mandate to push them toward continuous learning; they pursue it because they want to stay ahead of the curve, not because someone made it a requirement.
This is a useful diagnostic for applicants too. Admissions committees, much like hiring managers, can tell the difference between a candidate whose executive education plan was triggered by external pressure (a stalled promotion, a peer's achievement, a company mandate) and a candidate who is proactively closing a gap they identified themselves. The former reads as compliance. The latter reads as leadership potential.
A framework for deciding if now is the right stage
Ms. Mehta is careful not to offer a universal answer, because there isn't one. Her framework, distilled from her own decision process before choosing SDA Bocconi's IEMB, comes down to three honest questions:
What stage of your career are you actually in, and what do you need next? A foundation (better served by an early-career MBA), an acceleration into strategic and leadership roles (better served by executive education), or a specific technical gap (better served by a targeted certification)?
What is the actual mechanism of value you're seeking? Global exposure, cross-industry peer learning, a specific strategic capability, rather than a vague sense that "this will help my career"?
Are you doing this because you are chasing pure learning, or because you want a credential to display? Ms. Mehta is unambiguous that a program taken purely as a certificate, without genuine intent to learn, is close to worthless. The hours sacrificed, evenings, weekends, family time, only pay off when the motivation is substantive.
She also offers a piece of guidance that applies directly to program selection for consultants advising applicants: do not choose the most recognizable name. Choose the program that bridges the specific gap between where the candidate is today and where they want to be in two to five years. That is a materially different selection criterion than "which school ranks highest," and it should shape how a candidate frames their "why this program" essay.
What this means for how executive applicants should be presenting themselves?
For professionals with 10 to 15 years of experience building their case for an executive MBA or executive master's, the evidence, both from Ms. Mehta's lived experience and from the broader ROI data, points to a consistent narrative structure worth adopting:
Anchor the "why now" not in tenure or in a stalled paycheck, but in a specific, namable capability gap: the ability to influence beyond one's function, to operate with judgment in ambiguity, or to translate domain depth into enterprise-level impact.
Treat the peer cohort and the program's specific format (global immersions, cross-industry composition, faculty who bring live case material rather than theory) as central to the "why this program" answer, not a footnote.
Resist the temptation to frame the degree as a credential to be displayed. Reviewers, like hiring managers, can tell the difference between a candidate chasing a title and one chasing a transformation.
Be honest about trade-offs. An MBA taken purely for salary uplift is an expensive credential with diminishing returns without a clear plan attached to it, but the same investment, tied to a specific leadership trajectory, tends to compound.
The deeper insight Ms. Mehta leaves us with is this: the ROI of executive education was never really about the number on the offer letter two years later. It is about whether the person walking out of the program can sit in a room, understand every function being discussed, and contribute a perspective that only comes from having deliberately broadened their lens. That is a story every applicant with a decade or more of experience already has the raw material to tell. The work of a good consultant is helping them see it, and then helping them write it.
This piece draws on a conversation with Heena Mehta, Manager - Talent Acquisition at Project44 and IEMB candidate at SDA Bocconi, alongside current market data on Executive MBA ROI and compensation trends.