My MBA journey, one year on

Distance Learning MBA participant, Freddy Bob-Jones, reflects on his journey so far after completing the first year of his MBA.

One year in, eight modules down, two weeks spent at Warwick Business School (WBS), months of serious toil, meeting lots of cool, smart, interesting and diverse professionals from across the globe, lots of laughs with my course groups and some hair raising moments in exam rooms. It’s time to reflect on my Warwick MBA journey so far.

No mincing words — studying at WBS has been an absolute blast and serious value for money from the get-go. WBS has blended a market winning approach to delivering a full blown business boot-camp MBA programme, that utilises cutting edge technology and traditional pedagogic formats to deliver fantastic, practical and (most importantly) usable insights into all aspects on how businesses and organisations tick.

Company annual financial reports no longer represent scary tomes of daunting numbers, but are instead the first port of call to gauge a company’s strategic direction and performance. It’s been interesting to see how various leadership styles can impact on people and organisational cultures and the impact of the latter on innovation and creativity within both the private and public sector.

Likewise, it’s been insightful using a multitude of interesting case studies (from various sectors) to understand how the strategic context for a company’s positioning changes across market, industry and firm level layers and the various strategy tools and frameworks (like Porters 5, VCA analysis, RBV framework, blue ocean strategy and VRIO analysis) one can use to better understand a firm’s competitive and strategic advantage. It’s also been fun getting deeper into understanding the central role that the marketing mix (in all of its 4 P glory) plays in driving bottom line P&L performance across firms in various diverse sectors. I’ve also enjoyed getting a serious deep dive into industries that I’m not so familiar with — such the aviation, sports and ride hailing tech sectors.

Year two of the journey now beckons. It promises to be another interesting intense journey with deeper exposure to analytics (Digital Impact and Modelling Analytics), entrepreneurship and strategic HR management together with my dissertation that will probably look at aspects of technology firm strategy and operations in Africa. I’m definitely looking forward to what promises to be another fun, interesting and action packed 12 months!

Find out more about the Distance Learning MBA.