MBS Career Centre helps to navigate into unchartered territory

"The first thing I looked at was the Financial Times rankings."

Kate Webster
Corporate finance analyst
ANZ

It took three career changes in three different countries, plus an MBA, which she was forced to defer three times, for Kate Webster to get her current role as corporate finance analyst at ANZ.

Kate began work as a physiotherapist and then moved into recruitment, and finally into management.

She says that prior to doing an MBA, her career options were getting narrow and due to hit a ceiling. "Now I'm a small fish in a big sea, and I can move wherever I want, which is exactly where I want to be."

She added her new role was 100 percent facilitated by MBS Career Services. ANZ was one of several companies to present at an MBS recruitment drive during Kate's MBA. Jane Prior, general manager, Career Services, helped rewrite her CV and after much networking between ANZ, Jane and Kate, she was offered the role of corporate finance analyst.

Kate entered the workforce in 1994 (aged 21) with a degree in physiotherapy from the University of Manchester. After two years at the coal face she moved into management, first running a recruitment office in London, then setting up a subsidiary office in Canada for two years.

"On the day it got to minus 52c (with windchill factor), I picked up the phone and said, ‘I need to go somewhere warmer'," she says. "But the skiing was great," she added.

At the time, she was also concerned about deferring the offer of an MBA at the University of Westminster (UK) for the third time.

She had applied to do an MBA after moving into management from physiotherapy and finding that working in business with a medical degree tended to cause comment.

"As I progressed up the management pathway, starting one business and taking over another, I realized I was interested in finance and I especially loved the little exposure I was getting to corporate finance."

Unhappy with the MBA courses being offered in Canada at the time, Kate was faced with either returning to London or going elsewhere. She accepted an offer of integrating a Melbourne-based business into the parent company and moved here in 2004, then almost immediately applied to MBS.

"The first thing I looked at was the Financial Times rankings. At the time MBS was number one in Australia. I thought if I'm going to invest this much time, effort and money into an MBA, I actually wanted to do it at a prestigious school that was known internationally."

Kate did the first half of the course as a part-time student, then completed it full-time.

She believes that part-time students miss out on a lot. "You have to cull extra experiences because of a lack of time. And there's an element of just getting it over and done with-doing your homework, your assignments and studying like anything for your exams to cram it all in." She describes it as a, "I've just got to pass this course" game.

She claims full-time is completely different. "The electives I took were exactly what I wanted. One elective was at Stern University in New York so I had five finance courses. That gave me a massive step up on finance experience and knowledge which was a huge selling point when I came to be interviewed for the job I'm doing now."

Going full-time also allowed her to completely immerse herself in the experience. "Combining part-time study with full-time work was a bit of a balancing act and I wasn't putting everything into one or the other," she says.

Kate now lives in Sydney where she's just bought a new house. Her favourite past-time is sailing, followed closely by skiing and diving.