COMMERCIAL PROFILE, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN:UNA RYDER was already enjoying a highly successful career in marketing when she decided to take the MBA course at the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School.
“I had thought about doing a masters in marketing but that really would only have been getting an endorsement for something I already had,” she explains. “I wanted to do something more challenging and that’s where the MBA came in. Marketers are often weak in expressing their thoughts in financial terms. I wanted to be able to speak the language of financial directors and that’s part of what I was looking for in the MBA when I started.”
Her journey to the Smurfit School began when she joined Aer Lingus almost straight out of school in 1988. “I had started to do a degree, but it didn’t suit me for a number of reasons and I took the opportunity to join a wonderful company.”
She spent 13 years with the airline, mainly in sales and marketing. “I started in operations like everyone else and then moved into the marketing area. I spent three years in Paris, another three in Cork and then became marketing manager for Ireland and was international marketing manager responsible for all brand and international marketing by the time I left. I had no skills or expertise in marketing when I started, but Aer Lingus was that sort of organisation that would train you up.”
Her decision to leave, as with her subsequent decision to do an MBA, was motivated by a desire for new challenges. “I was very happy at Aer Lingus but I joined when I was 18 and had sort of grown up there. After 13 years, it was time to move on and do something different so I went into the hotel business – firstly with Jurys Doyle and then with the Gresham Hotel group. The two companies were PLCs, and it was important to me to get experience of working in that environment at the time.”
The desire to broaden her horizons took hold again and she moved into a very different role with the Genesis marketing agency. “Having spent 17 years in the broad tourism and leisure sectors, I wanted to broaden my experience,” she recalls. “I had always worked on the client side and wanted to see things from the agency side. I think clients sometimes outsource too much of their thinking to agencies and too much of the intellectual property ends up on the agency side.”
She spent what she says were “four fantastic years” with Genesis. “The agency was a very dynamic environment and I was dealing with a broad spectrum of clients. One day I could be working on processed cheese and the next on a business tourism strategy for Ireland. I was constantly jumping from one thing to another and it was very enjoyable. That’s when I started thinking about an MBA. Genesis was very encouraging in terms of personal development and that’s one of the things that probably made me jump. I had thought about a masters for a while but this time I was actually going to do something.”
She looked at a number of different options, before deciding on the UCD Smurfit School MBA. “I looked at the options, both internationally and domestically. I considered taking a year out and doing it full time. I had lived in Paris for three years so I knew a lot about the Insead MBA and I looked at that. It was going to involve a significant investment in terms of finance, time and effort and if I was going to put all of that in I was going to make sure I did it right.”
Her first decision was to take the parttime option. “I looked at the practicalities of it and decided that part time suited me very well. When you’re working you’re dealing with live projects every day; there would be no danger of the becoming entirely conceptual, continuing to work would keep it real.”
This meant staying in Ireland, and it was then a case of whittling down the available options. “In the first place, any course I was going to do had to have full international recognition and the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School holds accreditations from the three top international bodies – EQUIS, AACSB and AMBA. UCD also offered me the flexibility to do the course at weekends, and that was important to me as well.”
Another factor in her choice was the reputation of the institution itself. “The Smurfit School certainly has a strong business brand. This was my own ¤30,000 I was spending, so I wanted to make sure that, when I was selecting a school, I wanted one that would have a solid reputation among employers. UCD ticked all those boxes for me.”
She began the course in 2005 with very specific objectives in mind. “When I started, I wasn’t particularly interested in what grade I got; I wasn’t interested in trying to beat a system and get a good grade. I was looking for something to challenge me, to kick start me and give me a step change in my own thinking. I was very much doing it from a personal development perspective.”
The course certainly fulfilled that objective, but exceeded expectations in other ways. “One of the most important things for me was the group. There were a lot of us on the course in our mid- or early-30s, and there were many people in the room with a good 10 years’ experience behind them in various careers and you were genuinely able to learn from this people. There was so much expertise and experience in the room; it was great.
“The lecturers were great, too. They weren’t just good lecturers, they were facilitators. The subject matter was just the starting point. There ended up being a big gap between what I thought I would get out of the MBA in 2005, and what I actually took from it in 2007. Of course, it teaches you a lot of valuable skills, but the most important thing it gives you is a whole new way of thinking. That’s what the whole process of the MBA gives you – the ability to look at things differently. It’s only now after a period of time that I can look back and realise how I approach things very differently to the way I would have before I did the MBA.”
The other aspect of it she found valuable was the teamwork. “The MBA is exceptionally hard work,” she says. “There is no hiding from that. This makes you learn how to work in a team. The volume of the work involved means that you have to trust the other members of your team because there is simply no way you can do it all yourself. Hard work and the ability to work in a team are the two key things you need to succeed in almost any organisation, and the MBA gives you that ethos.”
Having qualified in 2007, Ryder made another career move in 2008 when she left Genesis to take on the role of director of marketing and business development with McCann FitzGerald, one of Ireland’s leading law firms. She finds the MBA very relevant to her job. “In the current environment, no business can afford to have fixed assumptions about anything. Nothing can be allowed to go unchallenged, and everything has to be subject to rigorous testing. The MBA gives me the strategic skills and the vocabulary to have those business conversations with people within the firm and with our clients.”
She would highly recommend the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School MBA. “It opens up career opportunities. When firms are looking to recruit the best graduates, they will look to the Smurfit School. Like any marketplace, everyone has to look for a competitive advantage and the UCD MBA certainly gives you that.”
UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School is hosting an evening seminar specifically for women interested in undertaking the MBA. ‘Women on the MBA’ will provide an opportunity to meet and network with female MBA alumni who will be sharing their experiences and highlighting the importance of the MBA in the workplace. For further information on the event and UCD Smurfit School MBA go to smurfitschool.ie.
