Want to be a chief executive of a FTSE 350 company? Here’s the route to follow

Want to be a chief executive? Here’s the route to follow

Hit the sweetspot to becoming a company boss by being male, 46 years old, with a university – ideally Oxbridge – education.

By Rebecca Burn-Callander

6:01AM GMT 31 Oct 2013

The average chief executive of a FTSE 350 company is a 46-year-old male, who attended Oxford or Cambridge University, according to research by business intelligence company QlikTech. The company crunched background data on all of the current FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 CEOs, as of August 2013, to find out where they were born, where they went to university, and details around the subjects they studied and key points from their later career.

If you plan to be a FTSE CEO, you only stand a fighting chance if you’re born in the UK. Some 58pc of the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 CEOs hail from Britain. In second place is America: 7pc of the 350 CEOs were born in the US.

The findings also show that despite the government’s efforts to get more women into blue-chip boardrooms, males still dominate as chief executives. Only 4pc of those heading up FTSE 350 companies are female.

A university education is an essential for any individual hoping to progress to the CEO level in these firms. Only 10pc didn’t attend university at all and 15pc attended either Oxford or Cambridge.

Drilling down further into the university education of FTSE bosses, the research found that after economics and business, law was the most popular subject studied, with engineering close behind. Interestingly, 26pc of chief executives studied arts subjects – and only 17pc specifically graduated in business. Science is also a hugely popular subject for future CEOs: 98 of the 350 graduated with science disciplines.

Although the Oxbridge institutions came out as the most popular universities, the University of Manchester also educated 14 FTSE chiefs. Interestingly, 8pc of the FTSE 100 also went to Harvard.

Having an MBA has proved very helpful on the road to becoming a FTSE boss as nearly a fifth (18pc) of the FTSE 350 chief executives have this qualification.

And while the role of FTSE boss may not be one for life, the average tenure is still fairly lengthy at six years.

“With this research, we want to make available data easy to analyse for ambitious employees to find out what the ‘key ingredients’ are to become a FTSE 100 or 250 chief executive,” said Sean Farrington, QlikTech’s UK managing director.

“The main takeaway has actually been how little the average CEO has changed over the past 50 years. Although the business landscape has moved on significantly from the ‘Mad Men’ boardrooms of the Sixties, the FTSE 100 and 250 CEO lists are still surprisingly dominated by males of a certain age and from an Oxbridge background.”

If you want to investigate how to follow in FTSE bosses’ footsteps, take the tour of QlikTech’s app.