Daniel Kallal

Dan Kallal, a 35-year-old coffee connoisseur and world traveler from Edmonton, Alberta made the move to Houston, Texas to pursue a career opportunity around the time he was completing his MBA with AIB. As the Operations Manager of North America for Versys, an organisation specialising in industrial commissioning, start up and construction services in Canada and the US, Dan attributes much of his success that he has had to date in this role to his learning from the MBA program.  We took the opportunity to get to know Dan a bit better and find out more about his experience at AIB.

What was your motivation to start an MBA?

I knew I wanted to do one for about 10 years. So my background is project management, I had good success in that career, however I knew I wanted to pivot eventually and I guess zoom out a little bit and see the big picture of business. I knew industries are changing rapidly right now, especially the energy industry and I wanted to be enticing to pivot my career into a completely different profession and industry. I thought about it for about 10 years and it was the perfect right time to get into it.

Why AIB over a Canadian provider?

That’s a really good question. So I actually compared for about 6 months. I was trying to decide whether I do one at a university in my city, in Edmonton or the AIB one. But after a lot of research and realising how good AIB’s name was the full accreditations and how flexible it was working full time.

Do you attribute any successes to your studies?

I would. The company I am in we’re growing a lot right now, we’re expanding. We’ve done about 300% revenue increase in the last 2 and half years, so, we really had to build our operations processes open a new division in the United States as well so, it helped massively. Right from marketing to strategic planning, international finance came to play so a lot of my learnings I was able to implement almost immediately.

How was the support at AIB?

So the support was one of the biggest surprises I had. I knew it would be good, but it was astronomically better than I expected. I had a couple of scenarios where I was struggling in a couple of courses, two different professors set time aside for me as much time as I needed, on their own time I believe to help me through that. I was really surprised too even if it was with the online library or needed clarification on stuff you had a response, a lot of the time, within 30 minutes someone was getting back to you, so was astronomical.

What is your advice to anyone considering an MBA?

I would say go for it, I think it’s a big commitment, definitely a lot of work but it’s well worth it. It’s a great program and I would go for it because it’s very flexible for working full-time. It’s definitely not an easy feat but it’s very rewarding.

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