Career development is part character building and part risk assessment, and many do not take the hard decision to reinvent their career path simply due to the challenges of relearning. Roi Lavi, one of our Alumni talks about the impact of an EMBA and the journey into a new career path.
“Coming from a legal background in Israel, as a certified lawyer and legal advisor at Ernst & Young, and a bachelor’s degree (B.A) in Business Administration I had an academic motive to extend my business management skills set, amongst them economic and marketing, and so the University of Geneva was the choice I made. The second motivation to choose the University of Geneva was to integrate in the social and business circles in Geneva, shortly after I relocated to the city. I was fascinated by the fact that the learning environment was much dominated by international students from 20 different nationalities. Studying together with Swiss and international student was seen to me as an interesting opportunity to learn on new cultures. And finally, as I was not fluent in French at that time, the English program the university offered was perfect for me.
In general, the academic experience was very high level and focused on practical needs more than pure academic theories. We had numerous top professors who come from the business world with very valuable information and experience to share with us the students. To mention in particular, the positive experience I had with Prof. Raphaël Cohen and Prof. Gilbert Probst.
I appreciated the way the program was organized and scheduled, which enabled me to continue working, full-time, at E&Y in the first year, and in the second year I did a career change and joined a new start-up company in the field of Due Diligence services for the banking sector in Switzerland. At that time, most relevant course was definitely Entrepreneurship with Prof. Cohen. I could actually apply and test some of the elements we studied at that course (i.e., preparing a business plan) in my new professional challenge.”
Roi is currently a Managing Director at Sqope Intelligence that now has nearly 60 employees in 5 offices worldwide, serving more than 300 large banks and financial intermediaries.
