How to Become a Silicon Valley Professional

MBA candidates who seek out the Leavey School of Business often share a particular set of experiences and objectives. Highly motivated, well educated, and professionally successful up to a point, they’re driven to build careers in Silicon Valley but have stopped progressing toward that goal. Something is missing.

Read on to explore how the top-ranked Online MBA program at Santa Clara University puts that last, essential piece in place, transforming students from aspiring leaders into SVPs: Silicon Valley Professionals.

To support your professional development and ascent in an intensely competitive industry, the SCU Leavey School of Business has created the Ebook “Get Hired in Silicon Valley: Your Path to Success in the Heart of Tech Innovation.” It’s the next step in your advancement on a trajectory designed by seasoned Silicon Valley insiders to hone your business acumen and help you surpass the competition.

The industry experts of SCU’s faculty have identified four domains of expertise that are essential for success in Silicon Valley. They apply across specializations in the field, so you’ll need them whether you choose a general MBA track or a concentration in Data Science and Business Analytics, Leading Innovative Organizations, Marketing, or Finance. As detailed in the new Ebook, the innovative coursework and in-person experience of the Online MBA program instill and strengthen them all.

In choosing SCU’s Online MBA program, you affirm your priorities as those of a principled leader. You commit to modeling integrity, accountability, and cooperation. The program will teach you not only to share your vision, but to inspire and mobilize others to fulfill it. As a Silicon Valley Professional, you’ll foster collaboration and strengthen everyone on your team.

To get hired in Silicon Valley, you need a track record of building relationships successfully, navigating conflict, and engendering trust throughout diverse groups of people. As you become adept at communication and team building, you’ll be able to ensure team decision-making based on ethical principles and high-quality contributions from every person involved.

To deliver insightful analysis of any challenging situation, you must start by making sense of that which is unclear. In the Leavey Online MBA program, you’ll learn to bring order and structure to ambiguous data. You’ll become fluent at synthesizing information to clarify and present its meaning. As a result, by applying ethical principles and best practices in decision-making, you’ll be empowered to offer solutions that mitigate risks and collateral impacts.

Successful work in Silicon Valley requires an innovative, entrepreneurial mindset. Employers look for professionals who continually seek out new ways and new opportunities to create value for any given organization. As a skillful SVP, you’ll sustain strong ethical principles and communicate effectively to marshal people and resources, despite risks and/or failure.

The Ebook walks you through the SVP dashboard: an interactive online resource that’s exclusive to SCU. As you advance toward becoming a Silicon Valley Professional, you’ll use it to plan your electives and co-curriculars, collaborate with peers, request and receive feedback, and track and celebrate your professional development. In addition to serving as a portfolio where you’ll see your credentials adding up, the SVP dashboard is an important networking tool. It connects you with mentors, colleagues, alumni, and faculty members (many in Silicon Valley jobs themselves) whose insight will enrich your knowledge and experience, and whose support can further your achievements in graduate school and throughout your career.

To appreciate the value of being a Silicon Valley Professional and the opportunities for which it can make you a sought-out hiring choice, consider this: In the last week of 2022, a widely used hiring site listed more than 70 career opportunities—each one requiring an MBA—within a 25-mile radius of Silicon Valley.¹ More than half of them showed average starting salaries above $100,000, nearly the top 20% planned to start new hires at $165,000 or more, several showed salary numbers above $200,000, and one topped out above $345,000.

Richly varied across several areas of concentration, postings for these Silicon Valley jobs included:¹

Responsible for guiding the vision and execution of a new program that will connect senior leaders around the world with the university’s faculty to help them and their organizations tackle the biggest challenges they face today. Covering issues such as sustainability in business, responsible use of technology, access and opportunity, and the future of institutions, the program will include multiple modalities (online and on campus) and will be both collaborative and application-oriented.

Responsible for managing business development activities for high-profile named accounts and/or specific market segment(s) that lead to the expansion and growth of Security and SASE services product portfolio. Accountable for the coordination and strategy on assigned key account(s). Responsible for the overall development and implementation of the account plan.

Responsible for helping the product teams to refine and develop strategies, and to explore ways to maximize impact. This involves grappling with difficult questions around scaling, opportunity identification and prioritization, and how best to enter new markets and partnerships. The successful candidate would also be responsible for managing the operational cadence of this team and global program, including tracking and monitoring performance, as well as reporting out to senior leadership and to relevant internal and external audiences. This involves having detailed understanding of the core dynamics and metrics that drive business success, as well as the ability to work collaboratively and build strong cross-functional relationships. You would have to be comfortable in managing through ambiguity and with interpreting and synthesizing data from multiple sources. You should be able to clearly articulate and defend your recommendations in front of leadership, and then drive any follow-on execution with cross-functional teams.

Responsible for directly managing a team of both support and operations, focused on efficiency of day-to-day operations, cost reductions, key programs and capital projects affecting the building, and general management of all processing duties. Developing the team to create a strong culture of growth and learning is critical to the GM role.

Responsible for supporting the systems product roadmap strategy for a complex portfolio of product solutions, developed across multiple functional groups and deployed as integrated solutions. Responsibilities include managing the product portfolio roadmap, developing and conducting market and user research, making product and feature proposals, overseeing the writing of market and product requirements, and shepherding the product through evaluation, product development, and design control stages in coordination with product development and product management counterparts from cross-functional teams. The Director of Product Management is responsible for building and establishing this novel function, developing and meeting departmental success metrics while building and developing a team of product managers.

Responsible for implementation of compliance policies, including the code of ethics; conducting training and testing of procedures; contributing to preparation of regulatory filings; and tracking impactful trends, developments, and regulatory updates that pertain to the crypto venture capital business.

Join the elite community of Silicon Valley Professionals. Learn directly from industry veterans and acquire the principles and expertise that will define your career in the hub of Big Tech. Unlike any other graduate institution, the Leavey School of Business creates leaders equipped with the most current, relevant knowledge and empowered with the ethos for which Santa Clara University is acclaimed.

Become a prized hiring choice in Silicon Valley. Start by reaching out to an SCU Admissions Advisor today.