Megan Enders: Alumni network: Important MBA outcome
 Megan Enders
Alumni
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"My friendship network from the MBA course is what I draw on the most."
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In the ten years since she's done her MBA, Megan Enders has found that the long-term value has been less about her MBA subject matter and more about her MBS network of friends or alumni.
Although she admits that she still often revisits the core concepts in economics and strategy, she says, "My friendship network from the MBA course is what I draw on the most."
And it's not always business issues she explores with her former colleagues. She has 2-year old twins and is still managing to work part-time in a series of consulting jobs.
After doing her four-year undergraduate degree Megan spent her first five years in the public service. She started in the public service graduate program doing rotations in the Department of Tourism, then moved into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet where she was a policy adviser, analysing and preparing strategic briefings on transport, communications and environmental policy issues.
After the change of government in 1996 she transferred to Parliament House and this led to the chance to project manage the1998 Constitutional Convention on the question of whether Australia should become a republic.
Megan says she never planned to be a public servant but when she graduated in 1992 the economy was in recession and it was difficult to find work in the private sector in her home town of Canberra.
According to Megan, working in the public service had some advantages. She claimed that if you were capable you could get promoted quite quickly. However, the more senior she became she discovered bottlenecks in the promotion to upper-level management ranks, hence her decision to move to a minister's office.
She says, "As I had never intended to be a public servant for life, my plan was to do five years, make some great networks and use these to transfer into the private sector." However, her experience in the public sector wasn't easily saleable to the private sector. She added, "I felt I needed an MBA to make the career transition."
"Because I was self-funding my studies and had decided to put work on hold to study full-time, I only wanted to do the MBA at a reputable school, so the choice was between Melbourne Business School or a Sydney-based business school. I applied to MBS first for many reasons, but mainly because it had a better range of scholarships. Melbourne also had a lower cost of living, MBS was a standalone school yet was still linked to the well-regarded reputation of the University of Melbourne.
"The application process was fast and efficient, and I was offered a foundation scholarship, so I didn't bother applying to the other business school," she added.
The MBA experience itself was quite "daunting". Megan had no family or friends in Melbourne, she was the only one in her year with federal public sector experience and she hadn't been schooled in disciplines such as finance and strategy. The upside was that she was used to analysing issues and justifying decisions effectively, core skills which were called on regularly during the MBA.
She says, "I had to work quite hard. I was good at judgement and decision-making and able to weigh up arguments, but there's a lot of case study work, such as identifying and deconstructing the real issues in cases. My classmates from strategy consulting firms were innately good at that and I have them to thank for teaching me the techniques to crack cases."
She realized a 20% increase in salary immediately after doing her MBA, a 50% increase within two years and significant increases after that.
After her MBA Megan was invited to help on a human capital management project by Peter McLaughlin, one of her part-time lecturers, and shortly after that he offered her a full-time role as a consultant in his management consulting business.
Two years later she moved to Western Power in WA to become general manager of a new business unit where she had 600 people reporting to her. She was also the first woman in the executive team in the company's 75 year history. Megan was just 30 years old and had never led a team before.
Three years after this she was head-hunted by Rio Tinto for a similar opportunity. A couple of years after that, she left Rio, started her own consulting company and fell pregnant with twins.
"I landed a lucrative three-month contract as a temporary general manager in a Brisbane company but after arriving I discovered I was pregnant with the twins! I spent my first trimester commuting to and from Brisbane, then returned to WA with plans to continue consulting up to the birth. But they arrived two months early so despite my desire not to do so, I ended up taking my PC into hospital with me to finish a project while I was recuperating!"
The twins are now two and a half years old and she is about to have her third child, although she is still working part-time in her consulting business with plans to return to full-time work once they start school.
