Christine Blair

Do you want to tell us a little bit about your career history?

I am an engineer by trade. I started my career as an RF design engineer. In the last 10 years, I started to take more of a management role still in the R&D field and I’m leading a team of about 100 people to develop products into wired/wireless industry, production industry, etc.

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

I am applying the skills learned in the MBA every day. What I liked about the MBA is the fact that I’ve really developed a really broad range of skills in terms of human resource, marketing, strategy, finance and all those skills really I have to use them every day as I am developing the products and choosing the best product to develop in my portfolio.

Would you attribute any of your career success to having done the MBA?

I definitely attribute my career success to having done an MBA. The reason why I took on the MBA was up to 10 years ago, I was really focused on providing some specific solution to my customer and when I took on more responsibility, I realised that I needed to broaden my knowledge in other areas. The MBA gave me that knowledge and, therefore, this is why I’ve definitely managed to grow in my company.

Looking back on your journey, what were the best parts and greatest challenges for you and how did overcome those challenges?

Looking back at my MBA journey, I think the great part was the fact that I could directly apply the knowledge that I was acquiring during the study directly into my work and basically through that, I was able to deepen the knowledge and become proficient with those new skills.

The challenges, obviously it’s a lot of work so you’ve got to study hard, but the distance learning did allow me to organise my study around my work. I think the last word for any student wanting to take on an MBA is really, it’s a lot of discipline and a lot of focus obviously to be successful.

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