Matt Colquhoun

Manager – strategy and operations consulting, Deloitte

The course

UQ Business School MBA, The University of Queensland

The impetus Matt Colquhoun was serving with the Australian military when he started his MBA in 2012. Across two decades, he’d held a wide variety of posts – including project engineer and Black Hawk helicopter pilot – and wanted to transition to a civilian career. “I had a very diverse background in the Army and I thought the MBA would be a good way to gather up all the things I’d done in some sort of structured way that could help me find a role outside the military,” he says. “It would give me the skills that I didn’t get in the military and some confidence in areas that I wasn’t familiar with.”

THE WISDOM

“YOU’LL GET MUCH MORE OUT OF AN MBA IF YOU’VE GOT SOME REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE.” In 2013, he took a break from his studies while on a year-long secondment with the UN Truce Supervision Organization in the Middle East, based in Lebanon. ↓

The impact “I learnt an extraordinary amount from the people I was doing the course with, as well as the lecturers,” he says. Critically, the MBA helped Colquhoun believe that his disparate military experience was a positive and in 2015 he joined professional services giant Deloitte as a consultant.

“The MBA gave me the confidence to say, ‘Don’t be scared of that diversity… leverage that,’” he says. “When you’re innovating and thinking about problems laterally, having people from diverse backgrounds is good.” Colquhoun says the MBA also gave him tools for “breaking a complex problem down to its elements and presenting a plan to solve it… in a succinct way”. ↓

The juggle “They offer a couple of different modes. You can do it full-time or part-time in several different ways: one night a week, intensives on weekends or intensives during breaks – over Christmas or in June. That flexibility allows you to choose when you can fit it into a reasonably busy schedule.” ↓

The learning “One thing I didn’t do very well in the Army was network, because we don’t really need to. The MBA taught me to network and gave me a bit of confidence in networking. It’s not the coursework that teaches you to network… more getting to know the colleagues in your course and learning from them.”