CUHK MBA Helped Redefine My Career Priority & Found Me a New Path in Engineering

I have been working as an engineer for many years. Two years ago, I realised that it was time to equip management skill and business-related knowledge to prepare for a managerial role. That was why I made up my mind to pursue an MBA.

Studied in Hong Kong made me more competitive in the Asian Century

Asia plays a more and more important role in the world’s economic development. To seize the opportunity in this Asian Century, I chose to study for an MBA in Hong Kong. As an international city, Hong Kong is an ideal place for people like me who cannot speak Chinese to know more about the Chinese culture. I can also gain insights on Chinese business development and opportunities from the mainland Chinese fellows who come from diversified backgrounds during my study.

After researching different schools in Hong Kong, I found CUHK MBA suits me the most as its curriculum design combines theory and practical experience. For example, I am able to pitch to real investors in the Applied Entrepreneurship course, and I can work with a real company to apply theories into practice in the Business Practicum course.

Redefined my career priority, from consulting back to engineering

Probably the same as a lot of MBA aspirants, I had considered a career in consulting while I firstly joined MBA. However, after obtaining more insider information from professors, classmates, and alumni who worked/ are working in the consulting industry, and attending workshops on consulting held by our Career Management Centre, I started to realise consulting would not serve my best interest. Even though I am interested in the business world and excited to solve different business problems, the fact that being a consultant could only provide advice or recommendations to clients but not make the final decision made me feel less accomplishment. Compared with being a consultant, I found that I am still fascinated with being an engineer.

During my MBA studies, my business mindset started to evolve from the typical engineers’ mindset. Engineers are always looking for “that exact answer”, but in the real business world, there could be multiple ways to approach the same challenge and lead to different solutions. Being agile is one of the critical rules in business survival. I also learnt to be more agile through working with different classmates in different subjects.  Therefore, I start to take a step back and really spend time thinking about what should be my next move.  If something could change our future life, I think that must be related to technology and that kicked off my journey to look for opportunities in the technology industry.

At the beginning, I was highly doubtful that whether I was qualified for the technology industry.  I had my pre-MBA career in the aviation industry and I am not that young anymore. Fortunately, inspired by my elite mentor, Mr. Peter Yan, CEO of Cyberport Hong Kong, I took a different perspective to look into my previous experience and qualification and rebuilt the linkage with the competencies required by my interested job opportunities in the technology industry. He also introduced me with real-life examples who had successfully transformed their careers to technology from various backgrounds.

To secure a better chance for industry transformation, I decided to look for engineering jobs in the technology industry in Japan. Luckily, I received a job interview from a fortune 500 company as a Support Engineer. To seize this opportunity, I have consulted with the Career Management Centre of CUHK Business School a couple of times to work on the resume, get advice for interview, have mock up interview, etc. I appreciate they were able to provide very solid advice and I eventually got the offer.

 Start my new journey with skills learnt from CUHK MBA

Compared to my previous job, which is internal and hands-on maintenance work focus, the new job will push me out of my comfort zone to be external client facing and play a more like advisory role. I believe that the negotiation skills, communication skills and decision-making skills I have learnt during my MBA will definitely add lots of value to my new role.

 

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