A recent reunion of Executive MBA alumni hosted by Nottingham University Business School gathered an enthusiastic group of people united by a common bond of friendship and a collective experience that can only be shared by those who have toiled, laughed, cried, and triumphed together during the intense period that is an MBA.
The highlight of the weekend was a professional development day held at the Jubilee Campus which aimed to boost knowledge on some the latest thinking in business management and provide an opportunity for the alumni to share their personal post-graduation career journeys with each other and an invited audience of current MBA students as inspiration for their futures.
A business master class delivered by Professor Simon Mosey (Director of the Haydn Green Institute for Enterprise and Innovation) and Paul Kirkham, Researcher in Entrepreneurial Creativity introduced the ‘Ingenuity’ process they have developed drawing on radical innovation to solve real-life business problems. Participants identified business issues from their own workplaces and generated a range of possible solutions.
Commenting on the session, one alumnus said: “It was a great opportunity to develop valuable new knowledge that we can use in our workplace and it’s not something we could have organised ourselves. I have collected up all the dozens of Post-it notes we used to come up with new ideas and will type these up and share them with my colleagues at Frankfurt Airport when I get back to work.”
The individual career presentations proved especially popular and revealed that in the ten years since completing the Executive MBA alumni have gone on to develop senior level careers in a wide range of sectors and industries including marketing, HR, logistics, retail, IT and general management. A number have also set up their own successful businesses. The experiences of Executive MBA alumni certainly provided food for thought for the incoming MBA students who had literally just started on the programme at the beginning of the week.
The forum was also an excellent networking opportunity and resulted in lots of informal discussions about potential internships, placements and dissertations or projects. One current student remarked: “I thought it was a terrific idea to invite the new MBA students to take part as it gave an insight into how they can make the most of their time with NUBS".