DEACONU, Alecxandrina; RADU, Catalina. (2014). Business education and career opportunities. The overarching issues of the european space: the territorial diversity of opportunities in a scenario of crisis. Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto. Pp. 390-399 BUSINESS EDUCATION AND CAREER OPPORTUNITIES Alecxandrina DEACONU Cătălina RADU The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania alex.deaconu@yahoo.com; catalina.radu@ase.ro Abstract Business education offers a wide range of opportunities and is clearly one of the most successful types of education in Romania and worldwide in terms of finding potential candidates. The potential „attraction” is higher, as a result of the wide range of opportunities that might appear after following such a path. However, measuring success in education means looking not only at inputs, but also at outputs, at students’ personal development during the educational process, at the success of graduates on the labour market and at their insights regarding their career. In this paper we aim to feel the „pulse” of the students from the economic fields (business higher education, including MBA programs), by taking into account their changed perceptions due to the continous dynamics of the business environment. It is hard to predict how education in general prepares present students for a future innovative and creative society. If we are talking about the system as a whole, it is even more difficult and unfortunately tending to lead to a quite pessimistic answer (although we are optimistic and we are sure some changes will be perceived soon). For the moment, we consider that our educational system – and we are referring particularly to Romania, since this is the place we live and work – is more likely mass-oriented, with a trend of liking mass in everything: a lot of students in order to cut costs (also believing it is easy to do that without lowering the quality), a very specialized way of dealing with everything, a preference towards performing the very same task over and over again and a general easiness for teachers to choose lectures with less interaction. We do believe that some changes have already started to happen. We do have teachers that are more student-oriented. Students do appreciate them, and, as a result, some of these teachers received recognition or even prizes. These teachers appreciate creativity more, are closer to their students and are facilitators rather than transmitters of information. They know they can learn from students as much as students can learn from them. They value diversity and try to build on it. It is generally perceived that this is the only way business schools do attain their goals of developing well- prepared people. Beyond our beliefs, this paper is one of the results of a study conducted in The Bucharest University of Economic Studies in 2012. It aims to present some ideas referring to our students’ perception on career. In order to find their main insights, we used a questionnaire for which we obtained 107 valid answers and accounts for 8 students and 2 graduates as a complementary qualitative approach.