Can engineers do MBA in Finance?

One of the questions that plagues engineers when they make their way into management degree is that will they be able to take up Finance as their specialisation. Now the normal argument here is that a student who is from a commerce background can find it easier to make it big in finance as they already have the basics sorted out. Sure they may already have the concepts sorted out, and you might be thinking to get as far away from finance as you possibly can and go for something like marketing or HR. This is the place where you must understand that you can do any specialisation you want to. There are a couple of reasons for that, let’s explore.

First of all, management courses have never barred you from choosing your specialisation. It does not matter if you are a commerce graduate or an engineering graduate you are given the choice to choose any specialisation you want including finance.

Secondly, you have all the mathematical and analytical skills you need to grasp the concepts of finance. In engineering you already have your engineering mathematics and even rest of the technical subjects require you to have some kind of mathematical knowledge. In engineering (depending on your syllabus or preference) you are also taught subjects like Engineering Economics and Costing which would have helped you in gaining a basic idea about the concepts used in Finance.

Thirdly, there is scope of employment. Once you have completed your degree in finance after engineering you can find employment in niche sectors like accounts manager in a manufacturing company or an IT company, banking technology manager or finance manager.

Lastly, if you fear that once you choose finance as an option you will be stuck with that specialisation, its not true. You can also apply for some selected jobs in the field of marketing, manufacturing, or in the IT sector. Plus if you are really sceptical of this claim you can always have the option of dual specialisation which is offered by some management institutes.

I agree that there are certain drawbacks associated with taking up finance as a specialisation after engineering because there is bit of a learning curve and you have to go head to head with students who are already familiar with the concepts of finance but take this statistic in point, out of ten students who had scored 100 percentile in CAT exam of 2012, eight were engineers from IITs. Most of the students that get into prestigious institutes like IIMs are engineers and some of them take finance as their specialisation. So if they can take up this step why cannot you do the same?