Leadership
Claudia Akemi Umemura used her MBA to help her re-enter the workplace and now helps other women to progress. MEET THE CHANGE MAKER Mum ’ s the word
I f Claudia Akemi for the female pupils. “Never allow society to define who you are. Only ever be defined by your dreams.” It is the maxim by which she has lived her own life, first as a young girl growing up in a third- generation immigrant Japanese family in rural Brazil, as an executive, and then as an expat mother in three different countries. Finding herself consistently overlooked in the jobs market, she decided to take destiny into her own hands and apply for the Global Online MBA at Warwick Business School. “My story is probably very similar to those girls in India,” Umemura ever returns to the schools of Pune, a hill town in Maharashtra in India where she worked as a volunteer, she will have an important message says Claudia. “I grew up in a very traditional community in a small place called Navirai. Some of my relatives were more interested in girls getting married than in them going to university. “But I did go to university with the encouragement of my father, and that set me on my career.” A psychologist by training, she worked for many years in large organisations such as Cargill and FESA, where she led talent management for one of the largest executive search firms in Brazil. She subsequently started up her own executive search and HR-related business when she moved to the United States with her husband, who had been offered an overseas posting at Volkswagen. As she followed her husband on to Germany and India, starting a family along the way, things became more difficult. Barred
from working in India by strict visa rules, she maintained her skills by volunteering for a charity that connected international travellers with schools in Pune, which lies southeast of Mumbai, helping them to hold talks with pupils about their experiences. As enjoyable as this experience was, Claudia felt herself slowly being isolated from the corporate world – a feeling made worse when she decided it was time to return to that after seven years abroad. The business world, however, had other ideas. “When you become a mother and leave the traditional career path, it is much harder to find your way back into the corporate world,” Claudia says. “You are pigeon-holed as someone who is focused on her family. I felt I had so much to offer with the experiences I had abroad, the courses I did, and the diversity of people and cultures I had learned to interact with. But due to the gap in my resume, I was automatically excluded from candidate shortlists, or so it seems to me. It is really unfair.” “Don’t seek to win approval or try to make everyone happy. Instead, follow your dreams” The only way back, she decided, was to follow a long-term dream and apply for an MBA. “By now, I wanted to go back to Brazil, but I knew I wanted an
MBA that would keep me in touch with the international world and be about more than Brazil.” Warwick’s Global Online MBA (then called the Distance Learning MBA) caught her eye. “I had heard good things about WBS, particularly the diversity of its cohort. That was a draw for me,” she says. “As a Japanese Brazilian, you know, I never felt like I belonged to one country. I was always interested in the wider world, excited by different cultures and perspectives. “And of course, I saw the rankings – regularly the best distance learning MBA in the world according to the Financial Times .” She did not look back. With the MBA in progress and pregnant with her second child, she returned to her home country, settling in São Paulo; and although the Covid pandemic hit soon afterwards, it was not long before she was back in work, in a new role, with consulting giant Accenture. Claudia credits the Global Online MBA as being a major factor in this turnaround. Not only was it flexible enough in pattern and timeframe to suit her family life, but the careers service at WBS also shared valuable strategies on how to approach the jobs market.
wbs.ac.uk | Warwick Business School
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