My name is Marco, and I work at KLM. I started as an account manager, but I recently moved into my new role as a sales manager.
Do you think that pursuing the MBA has helped you make this step in your career?
There is certainly a connection between undertaking an MBA and receiving this promotion. The MBA provides a great deal of room for self-reflection: how you act in certain situations and how you evaluate those actions afterwards. By background, I am a technical person, so in my mind everything tends to be very binary - a zero or a one, as it were. Through the MBA, I have started to think much more about everything in between. Combining my technical profile with a more humanities-oriented perspective was one of the main reasons I chose to pursue this MBA. It has definitely helped me during the interviews that led to this promotion.
What can you apply from what you have learned during the MBA in your day-to-day work?
In the Strategy course, we learn to maintain focus on the bigger picture and understand our role within it. The MBA has helped me greatly with this. In my work, for example, I used to be very focused on the customer relationship, whereas when working with Americans I need to be much more task-oriented. Dealing with different cultures and perspectives, and understanding how to navigate them, is something that comes up in many MBA courses. I often find myself thinking during my work: “I recognise this from the MBA.”
