Focusing on Careers: Zach’s story

MSc Management

I graduated in 2011 with a non-accredited Biomedical degree and since then, despite successfully finding employment, I had found myself struggling to progress towards a satisfactory career in the same way as peers who have business degrees. Therefore, my motivation to return to university was not only to compensate for this, but to develop a transferable set of skills that would make me employable regardless of the working environment. The Postgraduate Financial Support Package (Leeds Masters Scholarships Scheme for 2015 entry) is helping me turn this into a reality.

Generally, a misconception of the business management degree is that it is only the management of people or businesses, but in fact it also deals with the management of information and the capabilities of managers. This will be invaluable to the career that I want in business analysis. I have already been very impressed with the business acumen, insight and transferable skills I am developing through my course. The crux of the Leeds MSc in Management is that it attracts a cohort from a variety of undergraduate disciplines and focuses on the transferable skills that they can bring. So far I am developing general presentation skills through video presentations; collaborative working and leading a team through group assignments; writing skills with an emphasis on reports; and personal and professional presentation. All these skills were touched upon my undergraduate degree but were never as fully developed as they are in this master’s degree, and the breadth of information and acumen is invaluable for a role in business analysis.

I feel the Careers Centre at Leeds is fully supporting me along the way and enhancing what I am learning in my course. Their careers fair put me in touch with major companies such as MARS, and their networking events have backed-up what I am learning from my master’s degree while enabling me to see the mechanics of the business through a professional perspective. Furthermore, in just an hour’s meeting, the Careers Consultant I met with saw that I had previously been on the wrong career path, and instead of generating a generic career path, she developed a structured plan that was directly related to the interests we had discussed together. She proof-read my CV and helped me with the confidence to apply for broader and more developed roles, ranging from HR and Business Analysis to Teaching, and is in stark contrast to my initial job area that had been confined to marketing.

Finally, I feel that my current degree has developed my entrepreneurial spirit beyond just dreams. The degree teaches the theory behind entrepreneurship and uses it as a conceptual framework to apply to interesting case studies, whilst giving us the opportunity to interact with real entrepreneurs through informal networking events. These have prompted interesting discussions with the entrepreneurs who visit us, and I feel that this will be invaluable when I set up my own company that fosters innovation appropriately – a form of entrepreneurship know as intrapreneurship – where an employee develops a form of entrepreneurship that enhances the productivity of the company. I can’t wait to graduate and start using my new skills in the world of business.