How an Alliance Manchester MBA helped me make the 'triple-jump'

Student profile

Name: Jawad Shaikh

Nationality:India

Job title: Manager - Strategic Partnerships at Jaguar Land Rover

A desire for career diversification

Jawad wanted to diversify his career further. He no longer wanted to work in engineering, keen to get a more holistic background in business in order to shift to a new industry.

"Working at JLL in Mumbai, a major financial hub for big international companies, I got an insight into other industries - it made me wanted to pursue an MBA to transition into a new one," says Jawad.

Jawad, who was not only a technical engineer but an author who penned two fictional novels before pursuing his MBA, always wanted to study his MBA in Europe. Being an English speaker, the UK was naturally the perfect place to study. But why Manchester?

Manchester's teaching method is based on real-life consultancy projects and structured based on those projects. That itself brings a unique experience for MBA students.

Career growth after the MBA

The choice to study an MBA has clearly paid off for Jawad. He moved into a corporate development role at Jaguar Land Rover in the UK, following a promotion after 11 months into a new role as Manager – Strategic Partnerships.

"Growing up I adored cars, motor-racing and everything in between, and still do. It was this fascination as a kid that led me to pursue my undergrad degree in mechanical engineering hoping to break into the automotive industry," says Jawad.

Understanding he could not make the shift into the industry without having deeper business knowledge, the MBA equipped Jawad "with the necessary core skills needed for my role" and "also helped with other equally important aspects such as diverse perspectives, cross-cultural & functional collaboration, people management, empathetic leadership and more."

Jawad was able to not only transition into a corporate finance and investment role, but into the sector he had hoped of working in as a child.

Making the triple jump 

Like much of his class, Jawad made the 'triple jump' - moving industry from real estate to automotive; moving job function from project management to corporate finance; and moving location from India to the UK.

Jawad credits much of this to his own personal ambition and the skillset he acquired on the MBA programme, but also the help from the Postgraduate Career Services (PCS) team:

"As an international student, I was unfamiliar to the job-market dynamics in this part of the world.

"I was able to lean on the team to help me navigate the different routes and nuances of the market, make introductions to professionals relevant to areas of my interest, prepare for my interviews, and in general, just polish off the rough edges as I developed my own career strategy over the course of the MBA," Jawad says.