What functional area seems to best prepare individuals to ascend to a F100 CEO position? This is a question I often hear from marketers, engineers, and others seeking to create a path that leads to the C-suite. They want to know if there is an early-career functional focus that will make it easier to climb the ladder.
To find out, I looked into the backgrounds of the F100 company CEOs and identified several factors associated with their career paths: undergraduate schools, undergraduate degrees, graduate schools, graduate degrees, educational majors, functional emphasis, the number of years at their current company (at which they are CEO), and the companies that produce more CEOs (methodology below). In previous articles, I have explored the undergraduate schools and graduate schools most attended by F100 CEOs, the number of firms F100 CEOs have worked for, the early company choices, and the undergraduate degrees of F100 leaders.
In this article, I explore the early functional choices made by the F100 CEOs - the first functional area the F100 CEOs pursued out of school.
Surprisingly, operations was the functional starting point for most of the F100 CEOs, with 25% beginning their careers in an operational role. Finance was the second most popular choice (22% of F100 CEOs began their career in finance), engineering the third (17%), and sales/marketing the fourth (13%). Accounting placed fifth most often (11%) and law was sixth (7%). Interestingly, management and consulting were last, each with just 3% of F100 CEOs beginning their careers in these areas.
Of note, in many cases, the early-career function chosen by the F100 CEOs is also the dominant function of the firm that they helm. For example, the Goldman Sachs, Liberty Mutual Insurance Groups, and AIG CEOs all started in finance-related functions. All three of these firms operate within the financial service space.
Lockheed Martin, Cisco Systems, 3M, Conoco Philips, and Honeywell are led by CEOs who started their careers in engineering. UPS, FedEx, and Comcast are led by operations-trained CEOs.
While not always the case, for some firms, there may be a primary, central function from which CEOs emerge (for example, the CEOs of Ford and Valero Energy have marketing/sales backgrounds). To determine if this is a pattern or a one-time occurrence would require investigating CEO choices over time. While not the point of this study, it would behoove students and those making early career decisions to look at the function from which the CEO emerges and see if there is a pattern. If you aspire to be a CEO, identifying a company that treats your functional area as grooming grounds for future CEOs might make the most sense.
For additional insight on Fortune 100 CEO career paths, see the following: the undergraduate institutions they attended, the graduate schools they attended, the number of companies they have worked for, the early-career firms at which they worked, the undergraduate degrees they earned, and the early-career functions in which they chose to work.
Source: www.forbes.com
