The 5 Highest Paid Toronto Internships for MBAs
Toronto is Canada’s largest city and home to leading companies in both business and finance. There’s a particularly large concentration of banks as well as media companies, publishing firms, telecommunication, IT, and film production companies. There’s a little bit of everything in the city including top MBA programs such as McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business, Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, and York University’s Schulich School of Business.
But where should you look for paid Toronto internships? First, the industry you choose matters. According to the 2018 employment report from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, you should stick with three industries if you want to earn the most money: law/legal services ($18,000 per month), consulting ($6,332 per month), and financial ($5,623 per month).
Specifically, you might want to check out these five high paying internships in the Toronto metro.
The 5 Highest Paid Toronto Internships for MBAs
Sun Life Financial is a Canadian financial services company headquartered in Toronto. It is as one of the largest life insurance companies in the world, spanning back to 1865. The company pulls in around $28.5 billion in revenue each year, with over 30,000 employees worldwide.
MBA students looking for an MBA internship have multiple options. In particular, there are positions in finance, HR, and real estate. There are also co-op options in the Business Leaders Internship Program. This program gives students ten weeks to work in a number of functional areas to learn where they can be successful.
According to Glassdoor, interns can expect to earn:
- Salary: $3,166 – $4,333 Per Month
Ontario Power Generation, owned by the government of Ontario, is responsible for half of the electricity generation in the Province. The company uses nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, gas, and biomass electricity. The energy diversity helps pull in about $4.73 billion in revenue each year, employing 10,840 people.
For MBA students, the company offers both winter and summer internship opportunities. Interns analyze new business opportunities, pitch marketing, complete customer research, and perform business model development.
Glassdoor reveals that an average intern earns:
- Salary: $4,160 – $5,440 Per Month
BMO Financial Group is a Canadian multinational banking and financial services company. It’s one of the big five banks of Canada and is the fourth-largest by market capitalization and assets. In fact, it’s one of the ten largest banks in all of North America with $21.7 billion in revenue each year and 45,200 employees.
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An MBA internship at BMO can cover a variety of job functions from financial modeling analyst to program management, investment banking, and capital markets. Through the program, students gain hands-on experience working with a team of seasoned professionals.
According to Glassdoor, an MBA intern can expect to earn:
- Salary: $3,000 – $4,160 Per Month
The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is a multinational financial services company and the largest bank in the country by market capitalization. It services over 16 million clients worldwide with personal banking services and products. 2017 estimates were around $40.6 billion in annual revenue with 79,000 employees.
RBC is home to a robust internship program with opportunities to work as a data scientist, business analyst, capital markets advisor, global equities, and more. Each internship program provides MBA students with the chance to work as a strategic advisor across a variety of industries from energy to health care, technology, real estate, media, and more.
As an intern, you can expect to earn a good salary according to Glassdoor:
- Salary: $4,833 – $5,166 Per Month
TD Securities is another Canadian investment bank and financial services company, offering advisory and capital market services. It is particularly known for providing expertise in corporate and investment banking, capital markets, and global transaction services. In 2016, TD Securities earned $3.03 billion in revenue with just 3,800 employees.
As far as internships for MBA students, there are many interesting 10-week options with business tracks in corporate and specialty banking as well as retail and product. These internships provide practical, hands-on experience, and can lead to participation in the 12-month MBA Associate Track Program post-graduation.
Based on intern salaries submitted to Glassdoor, MBA students can expect to earn:
- Salary: $3,250 – $4,166 Per Month
Getting Paid: Highest MBA Salaries in San Francisco
San Franciso means many things to many people. Equal parts counter-cultural mecca, ground zero tech hub, haven for diversity, and real estate development nightmare, SF conjures images of Silicon Valley introverts and Haight-Ashbury hippies, as well as the high-earning Facebook employees who displace them.
London Business School Launches More Flexible MBA
An MBA program needs to continuously evolve to stay relevant. That’s why most business schools reevaluate their curricula every few years to ensure that they’re on the cutting edge.
The London Business School recently completed a top to bottom review of its MBA program to determine how it could improve. The school found that while it has a strong employment outlook, conversations with students, alumni and recruiters revealed than an overhaul of the program itself would help to better meet the needs of students and employers.
Why the London Business School Updated Its Curriculum
“There were two drivers,” Gareth Howells, Executive Director of the MBA, MiF and Early Career Programs at LBS, tells us in an interview. “In terms of inputs, we were seeing a diversification in our pipeline of the professional aspirations of our students. Historically, 80-85 percent of our students went into consulting and finance, but what we’ve found is that more candidates are coming to LBS and considering a much more diverse set of companies: tech, not-for-profit, luxury retail, etc.”
The need for this change was also reflected on the employer side. Though LBS still has strong recruiting representation from finance and consulting, Howells reported that Google and Amazon have become two of LBS’ biggest recruiters. In fact, 22 percent of last year’s LBS MBA graduates went into tech-related roles.
These facts made a compelling case for updating the MBA curriculum. “We’re not moving away from finance and consulting, but we feel that there’s a way we could restructure the program to better serve our diverse candidates and recruiters,” Howells explains .
Growing the MBA Program
To start, one of the first things that LBS did to better serve its MBA students was increase the size of its program. In the past, LBS has been considered a relatively small to medium-sized program. Currently, it enrolls about 420 students each year but, starting next year, they’re planning to add about 60 more students.
“Obviously, that will take us into that medium-size,” Howells says. “We felt it was right that the MBA should grow. We want to attract a bigger market share of applications. Since the launch of our updated curriculum, we’ve posted a 12 percent increase in applications, and we’re expecting this class to be our highest quality class yet.”
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
The changes go far deeper than class size. “We wanted to give students the opportunity to customize their learning journey toward the business sector they’re most interested in,” Howells adds. “In addition, we also wanted to make the program more practical. We’re giving our MBA students a wide choice of courses so that they can choose to broaden and deepen their skills how they see fit.”
To keep up with the constantly changing global business environment, LBS reviewed all of its MBA courses, as well as the knowledge and skill sets that they felt were common to all industries—whether working at Google or Goldman Sachs. When they did this, they were able to pare down their core courses to a small set of “sector neutral” topics in areas such as teams, finances, etc. Core coursework now only comprises the first semester of the first year.
Then, by the second half of year one, students can tailor their studies to better fit their sector-specific interests. “This puts students and recruiters in the driver’s seat,” Howells says. “We offer courses on digital transformation, marketing, customer and market insights, value chain management, global economic analysis and more.”
There are also many new courses focused on digital competencies. According to Howells, recruiters said that they needed students who were comfortable with programming, coding and digital transformation. So, LBS developed a suite of courses around this technology—including FinTech—so that LBS MBA graduates are able to navigate the new digitally focused world.
Focusing on Practical Experience
In addition, LBS adjusted its courses to be more practically focused. “Just giving theory isn’t enough,” explains Howells. “Recruiters wanted students to have a more integrated and practical learning experience—pushing the dial from knowing to doing.”
To turn this practical focus into reality, LBS has added an on-the-ground London experience in year one. This new experience capitalizes on the school’s location to allow MBA students to undertake a business project with organizations around the city.
“Leveraging our London location is important,” says Howells. “London is a global finance leader as well as a great location for tech, finance, entrepreneurship and more. A lot of our projects will be drawn from all the sectors and students will be able to target the industry according to what they want to do.”
This experience is followed in year two by the global experiential experience. “Global is in our DNA. Ninety percent of our class is not from the UK,” says Howells. “We have over 70 different nationalities represented in our MBA program.” Recognizing this, LBS takes its MBA students on a global business experience to one of seven different locations around the world to learn in the local environment.
Flexible Scheduling
Flexibility in the length of the program was also important. “We wanted to give students the best possible chance of maximizing their career output,” he says. “So, we decided to offer multiple exit points for the MBA to offer students maximum flexibility.”
Too often, MBA students will complete an internship and be offered an immediate job with the company, and they want to start work sooner. Or, they find a job halfway through their second year and want to get a jump-start. With flexible 15-month, 18-month and 21-month exit points, each MBA student at LBS can choose what works best for them.
And LBS doesn’t make students choose their exit point at the start. They can change their schedule at any time and work with a counselor to determine what classes they need to complete to graduate when they want. “We put the student in the driver seat,” Howells notes. “We tell them what they need to do to achieve the exit time frame they want, but they have control over how they accomplish it.”
So far, the new program is being received well. LBS received more applications for their first class under the new design than in previous years, and Howells only expects that trend to continue.
“No one wants to be put in a box,” he says. “We provide opportunities for students to drive their learning journey. We’re giving them control.”
Pepperdine University Investment Study Referenced In ‘USA Today’
A new article from USA Today, “How To Get Money For Your Entrepreneurial Dream,” featured a Private Capital Access report (PCA) by Pepperdine University and Dun & Bradstreet. According to the report, the PCA index exists to “measure the demand for, activity, and health of the private capital markets.”
Continue reading…
Financing Your MBA, Part 3
Moving right along in our multi-part series on financing your MBA, we’ll take a look today at some of the options prospective MBA students have for obtaining loans to finance their time at business school. For the purposes of this post, we will focus primarily on loan programs for U.S. students. International students, stay tuned for subsequent posts that will go into greater detail about loan programs tailored for your needs.
