Actually my own experience is pretty similar to Stressmerchant's, and I'm not in SA. I looked around for commercial jobs with my shiny new MBA under my arm but nobody was interested, they all wanted a prior track record in commercial. In the end I went back to engineering, but with a commercial/management angle, so my time wasn't wasted. My own observation is that an MBA helps an engineer broaden his horizons, because good engineers don't always make good managers.
But then I'm biased
