Rebecca Glover

CFO, World Vision Australia

The course

Melbourne Business School Executive MBA, The University of Melbourne

The impetus An MBA was a long-held ambition for Rebecca Glover, an accountant. “It rounds you out from the specialist areas you learn in your undergraduate degree and helps you understand the different streams of business,” she says. “You get a more holistic view.” She believed that “to get a seat at the leadership table, I needed to be able to contextualise my technical expertise across marketing, strategy, operations…

THE WISDOM

“I’M GLAD THAT I WAITED A GOOD 15 YEARS INTO MY CAREER – AND WELL INTO A MANAGEMENT POSITION – AND HAD SOME SIGNIFICANT WORK EXPERIENCE.” to be able to speak their language and understand their frames of reference”.

The impact Glover was already with World Vision when she did her MBA, inspired to make the leap from PricewaterhouseCoopers after she conducted an audit for the charity in Thailand in the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. An MBA is regarded as a business-career supercharger but Glover saw it as integral to her work with World Vision. Aid organisations, she says, are often “trying to move large resources and coordinate that efficiently, at speed, after a disaster, when systems are cut off, people are displaced and their futures are dependent on you doing your job really well”.

She was promoted to CFO shortly after finishing her MBA in 2014. “I regularly draw on things I learnt in my MBA to help me engage with my peers in the leadership team, who all have their different disciplines,” she says. “It’s helped me to more quickly understand other points of view and what might be driving them.” ↓

The juggle “The only time of day I could guarantee that no-one would interrupt me was 5am so I did two hours Monday to Friday from 5am to 7am and that knocked over 10 hours of study a week, which meant I only had to do a few hours on the weekend to complete my expected 15 hours each week. It became so ingrained that I continue to get up at 5am to this day but I’ve replaced my MBA study with exercise or other work.” ↓

The learning Glover says she was able to draw on real-life work issues during the MBA. “It helped me learn and apply the theory to my day job and I could draw on examples of my work experience to share with classmates. It brought the theory to life.”