Aside from supporting her lifestyle, quality teaching was also on the list of attributes Carbonell was seeking.

“I needed to make sure the information I was going to be taught was valuable and in depth,” she says. “Plus, I wanted that community engagement, even though I knew I wanted to study online.”

Carbonell, who now works in strata management, saw an MBA as a natural progression in her career, having had her focus on reaching general manager level in hospitality. Now working in a relatively new field, she also wanted to study at a school with a large and diverse network.

“I wanted to choose an MBA that could connect me with peers and with industry leaders as well. I knew the University of Melbourne had a huge network and global connections that I can tap into whenever I want.”

One of Carbonell’s teachers, Melbourne Business School (MBS) professor of business strategy Geoff Martin, has first-hand experience of the networking power of an MBA. Martin completed his MBA at MBS in 2002.

“My classmates are almost all now CEOs, senior vice-presidents, successful entrepreneurs and partners of consulting firms, among other successes,” he says.

This demonstrates how far it’s possible to go after completing an MBA at MBS.

“I put my classmates’ successes down to a combination of intellect, work ethic, education and network,” Martin says. “The last two of those come from doing our MBA at MBS.”

Melbourne Business School’s MBA plugs a gap in the Australian online MBA market for a high-quality offering that’s attractive to students from a range of backgrounds, Martin adds.

“We invested substantial resources in designing this program, drawing on decades of experience and feedback from alumni working across Australia’s top businesses,” he says. “The results are evident in our high student satisfaction scores.”

How networks can enhance careers

The school’s online MBA is designed to offer the type of education and experience that helps students like Carbonell make the transition from manager to leader. It also put her in touch with a group of like-minded colleagues. For instance, Carbonell was able to ask a connection she had made at a recent MBA summit (held as part of her program) to help her with a challenge she was facing at work.

“I was able to call on him for help when I wanted to put together a live dashboard with automated data links without having to manually upload reports,” she explains.

Aside from connecting Carbonell to people with the technical skills to help support her work, her online MBA offers her the opportunity to be part of a community she can rely on when facing other challenges as she moves through her career.

Long term, Carbonell says she is looking forward to seeing how her career evolves thanks to her online MBA.

“I’m starting to view things in a different way now,” she says. “I’m now able to look at situations in a new light. There will always be a better way to look at a problem and that’s one of the lessons I have learned from my online MBA so far.”

Learn more at online.mbs.edu