Taking an MBA can help transform careers, taking people from cogs in the machine to the boardroom.
For almost 40 years, the Sainsbury Management Fellows MBA scholarships have been helping people to add business skills to their technical toolkits from world-class business schools.
Hear from five business leaders on how they propelled their careers forward with their MBA.
Opening doors
Post MBA, Rauf Khan launched an early-stage artificial intelligence startup, tackling climate change and says the MBA can open doors.
He said: “I learned so much, not only from professors and lecturers, but guest speakers, mentors in the network, alumni, school staff, and my fellow students.”
He added: “(In life) there are so many incredible people who are left out. At one time, I felt left out too. I had lucky breaks. I had great parents who pushed me to dream bigger. I met people who cared about me a tiny bit more than they were obligated to and drove me to try harder.
“We can make others lucky, by helping them discover new opportunities, connecting them with people from their community who have done what they dream of doing, and offering funding so they can go after it. That is a powerful combination. That is what the Sainsbury Management Fellowship is all about.”
Game changer
Sagnik Mukherjee is a Senior Strategy Manager in the internal strategy function at energy giant bp, where he spent almost four years of his fledgling career before becoming a Sainsbury Management Fellow.
He says the MBA took him out of his comfort zone, enabling him to broaden his skill set and venture into areas he didn’t already know about.
He said: “INSEAD was a game changer for my career. People go into MBAs wanting to change their industry, region or seniority. I stayed in the UK, but I changed industry and seniority.
“Consulting was an important accelerant. INSEAD gave me a treasure trove of experience that I was able to progress my career. But it also provided so much more – it is about end-to-end personal professional development.
“That’s why I’m able to come into this new role. It is possible I could have arrived where I am today without the MBA, but it would have taken me a lot longer with a much more challenging learning curve.”
Commercial skills
Abhay Soorya built on his degree from the University Oxford with an MBA from INSEAD to help him add business skills to his technological toolkit. He believes the MBA gave him the ability to communicate in a different – and clearer – way to business people.
He said: “In my current role, the commercial knowledge and skills I gained via the MBA have proved invaluable. While I have always had the technical knowledge from an AI standpoint, my MBA study has modified my language to such an extent that I now have access to a certain set of stakeholders that I did not have in the past…You know the language spoken by the decisionmakers who hold the purse strings, allowing you to communicate with them and gain their buy-in.”
Improved confidence
Davina Patel says the MBA was a ‘phenomenal’ learning experience, allowing her to ‘connect the dots’ on what worked well and why – but found one of the biggest things was an improvement in confidence.
She said: “The MBA unleashed a newfound confidence in me. We all doubt our abilities and I was no exception. Being at one of the top business schools in the world I was surrounded by some of the best and brightest minds and the experience made me believe that with hard work and a learning mindset I could aspire to and be good at so many different things…The MBA provided me with skills that could be applied to a variety of different industries and allowing (once closed) doors to open for me.”
Unparalleled network
When Will Jones was asked to cite the greatest benefit of doing an MBA, it was not the toolkit of technical business skills that he highlighted. Instead, he said it was about how his contacts book had swelled.
He said: “I value highly the diverse network of truly inspirational people who are only too happy to help if asked in the right way.
“INSEAD was an incredible learning and growing experience. No matter what the day, what the module, or how intensively I had to work, I always ended the day knowing that in some way I had developed as an individual.”
He added: “Leaving business school is actually the start of an amazing journey, not only because I moved onto an unexpected new career, but also because I am now part of the Sainsbury Management Fellows network – a large group of interesting individuals who work across a breadth of industries.”