Alumni Stories · General Management - Leadership - Transition - Organizational Transformation

The IMD MBA: A catalyst for career advancement

As part of IMD’s MBA program, career professionals support participants to reach the next step of their professional lives
May 2019

“IMD’s MBA Career Development Center directly helped me get my job by initiating contact with prospect companies.”

“Right from the onset of the MBA program, in fact even before, the IMD MBA careers team started guiding us through assignments and workshops which polished different skills throughout the year and helped us put our best foot forward during recruiting season.”

“IMD’s MBA team were very helpful in my decision-making and helped facilitate four separate recruitment processes for me.”

These are just a few comments from graduates of last year’s MBA class at IMD.

Ana Du had three promising career offers before being recruited by Workday as a Customer Strategy and Value Manager immediately after her graduation in January.

“I’m really enjoying my new position at a fast-growing company,” said Ana.

She was especially grateful for the amount of one-on-one time Julia De Vargas-Marquez, MBA Career Development Center Director, spent with her helping figure out what she wanted out of her next career step. Her goal was to change industry from consulting to technology and that is exactly what she ended up doing.

Discussing her key takeaways from IMD’s MBA, she said that without knowing it at the time, the intensive Innovation Week provided some of the main ones, in addition to the general management basics and leadership that were part of the overall program.

Little did she know last year that she would become a design thinking champion at her company, a concept she became more familiar with during innovation week. She said she also didn’t fully understand why she needed to know about agile ways of working and scrum methodologies but that they are now essential in her current position.

Boosting international careers

For Pedro Augusto Kniphoff, his goal was to broaden the international scope of his career.

Pedro says the IMD MBA “Gave a boost to my resumé from domestic to international. It developed me from being a specialized finance professional to someone with a holistic view of business.”

Thanks in part to the help of the Career Development Center, he is now CFO MEA Region at CO-RO, a food and beverage company based in Denmark. “The career team helped guide me through my search and provided excellent networking opportunities,” he said.

When asked what changed about his career specifically, he said: “Exactly what I wanted to change – Geography. I went from Brazil and South Africa to Dubai.”

Creating opportunities

Another MBA alumna from 2018, Neharika Agarwal, said: “The personal attention from the team and the career coaches assigned to us assisted immensely in building a career window, creating a value proposition and providing a platform to meet the right companies and executives beyond what I could have dreamt of otherwise.”

Her career transition following the MBA saw her progressing in a number of areas including geography, industry and position. She joined the Financial Excellence Program at Siemens in Germany.

Summing up her experience in IMD’s MBA program she said: “The program helped me gain a 360-degree understanding of different parts of business through its focus on solving real-life challenges, a toolkit of frameworks for strategic decision-making and become a more effective team player and high potential leader through its personalized leadership development program.”

Find out more about IMD’s MBA program.

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