“It was the right time to go for it”

As difficult as the last couple of years have been, many of us have used the time to try something new or develop ourselves through learning. One associate that took lockdown learning to an extreme was George Kamakaris, who enrolled at Warwick Business School to study a Masters in Business Administration (MBA). George tells us about his experience of night-time study with a toddler, gaining new perspectives from his classmates and how curiosity drives his success.

“During the pandemic everybody had more time at home,” explains George. “I always wanted to do an MBA. I realised I had some time on my hands and that it was the right time to go for it. Many people in my class thought the same.”

George is now halfway through the course and has done 8 of the 12 modules. He’s funded it himself, and it’s taken a lot of dedication and time management to make it work, especially as he has a young daughter. “The course is online and you can do it live but what I really like is you can also watch the classes later,” he says. “It’s fantastic for me because if it’s midnight and the little one doesn’t want to sleep, I can study! But mainly I try to study right after work.”

With the support of his manager, George has been able to take a couple of days off work here and there to study, and has also used a few days of holiday. One piece of advice he has for anyone who’s thinking of studying for an MBA, or any degree, is to make sure you can find the time to put the work into it. But the benefit of doing an MBA becomes obvious quite quickly.

Studying the way a business works in such detail has given George a real insight into how a company like Bosch works. His MBA is already opening his eyes to how the work of other departments around the business influence what he’s doing.

“There is a lot to learn,” he says. “One of the reasons to do it is to understand other functions of the business better, whether it’s finance, accounting, marketing, communications… For anyone who is willing to explore other departments, it would be a great insight for them.”

“It’s given me the perspective of the other people in the class, so I now understand a lot of viewpoints,” he says. “When we discuss a problem or a plan, I listen to what the others in the class say and I can see that there are a lot of different approaches and viewpoints. I develop a better understanding of my agenda as well as their agenda and so collectively we can make the best decisions for the company. Often we only think about our own agenda, so we don’t make decisions holistically.”

To really get the most out of the course George suggests waiting until you’ve got a good few years of work experience under your belt. “The advice I would give is to not do it in your early 20s,” he explains. “Now that I'm older it's much more beneficial, I've been exposed to so many things in my work so I can relate to more of the course. It's also useful to my fellow students, the fact that we all have a lot of experience in work means we have more curiosity about the roles we’ve all done. Perhaps if I had done it in 5 years’ time it would have been even better.”

It’s that curiosity that really drives success when studying an MBA. “You get some very important insights, and you get some experience. You need to be willing to explore other departments and the work that they do. I think it's given me three years of extra experience; it really does feel like that. When you have your eyes open you have a great opportunity to learn from other people and that’s very powerful. I would fully recommend others do the course.”

Read more about the growth and development programme at Bosch:

https://www.bosch.com/careers/why-bosch/growth-and-development/