Next Stage Oxford turns ten this year.
I could write about myself, but that would not be much use to anyone. So instead: what has changed for applicants over the past decade, and what has not.
Why I started
I applied to Oxford’s Executive MBA while working full time.
At the time there was almost nothing written for people in my position. Plenty for younger MBA candidates; almost nothing for someone in their late thirties or forties, with a job and a family, trying to work out how to build an application around both.
I went to the large preparatory schools. They were courteous, but the work was divided between specialists, and none of them had been through an EMBA admissions process themselves. The questions I actually wanted answered sat one layer below where they could go.
So I did it by feel. That inconvenience is the design of this practice: the person who got in handles your application, start to finish. That is the whole of it.
What changed (1): everyone prepares now
This is the largest shift of the decade.
Take the CV. A few years ago a surprising number of applicants believed an English CV was their existing career history, translated. Not any more. Most people now arrive understanding how much weight the CV carries.
Information has spread — and with it, preparation has stopped being a differentiator. The difference is made after that point.
What changed (2): AI is simply part of the process
The biggest change of the last two years.
Drafting an essay with AI. Having it correct your English. Neither is unusual now, and I do not object to either. There are places where you should use it.
But having read a great many drafts, one pattern is unmistakable.
AI-written prose converges.
The logic holds. The grammar is correct. It reads well. And yet you can go through ten of them without a single face coming to mind. Set against the volume an admissions committee reads in a year, that is a serious disadvantage.
The reason is simple. AI produces the correct shape for the genre. What is being weighed is not correctness but particularity — what this person, specifically, brings into the room.
I do not think this is confined to applications. The same thing is happening in CVs, and in interview answers.
What did not change
One thing has not moved at all in ten years.
You are the worst judge of the value of your own career.
There are no exceptions to this. Again and again, the material with the most weight in it turns out to sit in the part someone described as “there’s nothing much to say about that one.” It is their ordinary week, so they cannot see it as anything.
And the episode they most want to lead with is often the one furthest from what is actually assessed.
Which means the work is not really about producing something new. It is about re-reading what already exists and valuing it correctly. That is difficult to do alone. It is also difficult for AI to do. Somewhere in the process, your career has to be looked at by someone who is not you.
Ten years in, I think that is what this job actually consists of.
If you would like that outside view
What has accumulated over ten years is precisely that — a framework for what an application is actually judged on.
If you would like it applied to your own CV, we do that at no charge. Send it across and you will have a candid read back within one business day, including — where that is the honest answer — that we are not the right people for you.
If you would rather start with something lighter, there is an eight-question self-assessment. It takes about three minutes, stores nothing, and does not ask for your email.
Finally
Ten years have been possible because I got to watch people move on to their next stage from close quarters. The message saying they got in has not become ordinary.
In the eleventh year I will carry on the same way: one person at a time, handled directly.