Job seekers are often interested in identifying companies that employ alumni from their schools. Here are brief descriptions of four databases that uncover alumni-company links. The databases report on different although overlapping populations, and vary in the number and type of screening variables they provide. The biographical information given typically includes contact data, employment history, and, if publicly available, compensation.
Hoovers
To screen on specific job functions, compensation or age:
Build a List => Keywords
A keyword search for Wharton in the text of biographies will retrieve the names of about 1,300 individuals. You can then filter the results by country, sales, ownership or industry. Information includes contacts, compensation history, and an employment profile.
S&P Capital IQ (available in the Yablon Room at Lippincott Library)
To screen for degrees, graduation year, college/university or major:
Screening =>People=>Education
The sets created can be further refined by combining them with additional variables such as location or investment firm type (for example, the names of Wharton graduates who are hedge fund managers in New York.)
There are more than 180,000 individuals in Cap IQ identified as having an MBA. A search for MBAs graduating from Wharton retrieved more than 30,000. In addition to individual biographies, a unique feature of Capital IQ is the detailed summary that is available for the screened group of alumni. For example, the summary of the set of Wharton MBAs would consist of breakdowns and statistics of the following categories showing the number of individuals or the amount of money in each subdivision.
| Geographic Locations |
| Industry Classifications |
| Company Status |
| Company Type |
| Ownership Status |
| Investment Firm Type |
| Advisory Firm Type |
| Market Capitalization |
| Total Revenue |
| Total Enterprise Value |
| EBITDA |
Bloomberg (available in the Yablon Room at Lippincott Library)
Bloomberg’s PEOPLE module has biographical information on more than 2.6 million individuals. In addition to business executives, PEOPLE covers biographies of politicians, academics and celebrities. Bloomberg biographies consist of a brief career survey, address and contact information, links to news about the person’s company, and if relevant, publications, funds managed, board memberships. Compensation, if publicly available, is included.
Corporate Affiliations shows the corporate structure of more than one million public and private companies worldwide, with subsidiary listings and corporate linkage. In addition, use this database to find detailed lists of executives, their titles and biographies.
Of the four databases we are examining, only Corporate Affiliations allows screening on “gender”.
The table below shows the results of a search for women MBA graduates of the business schools ranked highest by Business Week (2014). The percentages of women in the Database is not representative of the percentage of women now receiving the MBA degree in the United States (about 45%).
Women MBAs in Corporate Affiliations’ Biographies
| School | All | Women | Women |
| Percent | |||
| Michigan | 352 | 27 | 7.7% |
| Penn (Wharton) | 1,202 | 119 | 9.9% |
| Chicago | 977 | 104 | 10.6% |
| Harvard | 2,514 | 268 | 10.7% |
| Carnegie Mellon | 65 | 7 | 10.8% |
| Stanford | 798 | 91 | 11.4% |
| NorthWestern | 753 | 87 | 11.6% |
| Duke | 221 | 28 | 12.7% |
| Columbia | 855 | 110 | 12.9% |
| Yale | 73 | 16 | 21.9% |
| Top Ten | 7,810 | 857 | 11.0% |
| Total Database | 22,588 | 2,555 | 11.3% |
For a recent analysis of women in upper management wordwide, see the report published by Grant Thornton: Women in business: the path to leadership as well as the article: U.S. businesses show little progress in advancing women during past decade.
Check our other posts with useful information for Alumni.
I Graduated!!! Can I use the Library Databases?
Library Database Access for Penn Alumni.
Datapoints: A blog from the Lippincott Library of the Wharton School of Business 