Candice Crawford

Why did you decide to study an MBA?

I’d been working for 20 years. I had three children and I decided it was time to study and up-skill to ensure that I was competitive among other people and women my age. I was also recently divorced at the time and having to look after three children and three lots of school fees and a mortgage, so I thought I need to do an MBA so that I can make sure I can sustain this for my kids.

The other thing was I really wanted my children to value education and understand that really to achieve what you want to achieve you have to challenge yourself and keep learning. While I suppose it was challenging at the time, I’m really glad now that I did it.

A lot of the students struggle with time management when they first start the course, how did you make it work?

Initially, I spent a lot of time looking at different universities and courses to find out which course I thought that I was going to be able to carry through with, especially universities and courses that required you to go into lectures. I knew that that was not going be possible with three school-aged children.

And so managing the timeframes and my timetable was challenging, but I knew that I could do it if I scheduled in enough study every day to achieve what I needed to achieve in that timeframe. Sticking to the timetable was very important.

How are you applying the skills you learned from the MBA to your role?

In my everyday job, pretty much everything I do, I’m utilising some of the skills that I learnt in the MBA. A lot of my role involves contracts and tenders and planning new services and strategy. This has given me a much more analytical approach to everything that I do, looking at what are the advantages for our organisation if we carry forth with this, what are the disadvantages, and the ability to identify risk.

That has been a huge plus for my work because there are certain things that we may go ahead with or may not go ahead with depending on the risk or benefit that brings to our organisation. I really value the learnings that I took on board throughout this course.

I’m also lucky enough to be closely involved with our board. I’m often involved with meetings with board members, the Chair of our board and our CEO, and so this course has given me a lot more confidence in understanding the different areas of the business and giving me the ability to interact well in that situation, which I wouldn’t have been able to do before.

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