Denise Edwards

Working for one of Canada’s big 5 banks, TD, across varied marketing, project management and process optimization experience, Denise was ready to take her marketing expertise to the next level.

After much considering of whether to specialise or to stick with a general MBA degree, the pull to specialise was far to great for Denise with an array of marketing specialisation subjects, like digital marketing and consumer behaviour calling her name.

Earlier this year we had the chance to find out more about how she found the course.

Why did you choose to specialise in marketing?

I kind of hemmed and hawed about whether or not to do when, versus doing a general degree. And I just really wanted to go deeper into marketing. And there’s a lot of marketing courses that I found were really interesting, like consumer behavior, and digital marketing, which are really, I think, practical and relevant in marketing landscape today.

And so I thought, would make sense to specialize in that or strategy. So I kind of hemmed and hawed between what, what discipline to go down, but I think marketing was the right fit. 

Do you feel it gave you more credibility as a marketing specialist?

I think it does. And when you look at what other degrees, or even just designations or certifications that are out there, they’re they’re not as deep, they’re still kind of superficial. And when you versus getting deeper into the materials that we get to, to do and when when we’re doing a specialisation.

So I think it really does help to have a broader understanding of how all of this all of the various disciplines within marketing come together. Because marketing in and of itself is quite broad. 

What were your apprehensions before starting?

Time commitment, I have a very aggressive workload, and just figuring out how do I balance, being able to keep moving forward with my career from a career perspective, while broadening my skill sets from a, you know, personal development perspective. And so I was really apprehensive of being able to juggle all of that, because when I put my you know, my heart into something, I want to spend more time in kind of do the best that I can and, and I know that the a new like going into an MBA was going to be quite intensive.

I think it just required a little bit more organization a little bit more planning to make sure that you could plan for the time that you needed to give to everything. So I think it just kind of pushes you to be a bit more thoughtful with what you do every day and planning forward. 

Is there anything you would have done differently?

It’s something I thought about, for a long time, I had got a lot of marketing about MBAs for quite a while. It was just something that was in the back of my mind, but it just felt like a big commitment to take on. And it really wasn’t a big commitment in the grand scheme of things. So it was something I wish I had have done earlier. I’m glad I did it.

When I did it, it kind of worked out well with with the pandemic and being able to spend even more time dedicated to it. But I would just say doing it, like that was probably the biggest regret just waiting so long to do it. It really wasn’t as monumentous I feel like from a time commitment perspective, it was just really having good planning and strategies in place to make sure you can balance your personal commitments, your work commitments and study. 

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