Richard Columbine
 Richard Columbine
Student
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"I come from a technical background and I felt I needed more formal education in the fundamental skills of finance, business planning and strategy."
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After spending his entire career consistently upgrading his CV with technical training, professional accreditations and soft skill courses, one student is using the financial crisis as an opportunity to obtain an MBA.
"My aim is to fill in some knowledge gaps around finance and strategy, and to round off some of my skill sets," says new Melbourne Business School student Richard Columbine.
Richard relocated to his wife's home town of Melbourne in August last year, to escape a failing UK financial market and to seek work in a stronger economy.
On arrival, the weakening job market in Australia accelerated his plans to return to full-time study. In November, mere days before the cut-off deadline for applications, he applied to study the Melbourne Business Schools full time MBA course.
"Anne played a big role in motivating me, getting my application process started then and there, saying, let's just get on with it."
"I met with her and we toured the school-library, courtyards, syndicate rooms and lecture theatres-and it was quite inspiring. Then we talked a little about the MBS experience-what happens on the course and what you go through."
"The MBS program and faculty reputations were outstanding and a big drawcard. I have high aspirations and MBS matched those," he says.
Columbine doesn't have any firm, post-MBA career direction in mind but he is looking forward to some early interviews with the Career Centre to discover his options. Based on his background which spans competition rowing, IT and finance, they are bound to be interesting.
Columbine spent most of his primary-school years in Switzerland, before returning to his parent's home country of South Africa to finish his secondary schooling and complete a Social Science undergraduate degree at the University of Natal (South Africa).
He then moved to London for a working holiday, spending two years working in a series of entry level accounting jobs which funded travel around Europe and national-level competition rowing.
"From when I started university until 2000, I competed in rowing at national level. The short-term contract work funded my training and gave me the flexibility to take significant breaks to go on training camps or on tour."
He says that as a member of the SA National Squad in South Africa he's won the national champs five times and while at the London Rowing Club in Europe, he's competed at the national championships twice in the UK, and three times at the Henley Royal Regatta.
In 1997 he returned to South Africa to continue his rowing while introducing a new concept of sandwich shops to Johannesburg and later getting some IT industry certifications, then he was back on a plane to London to kickstart his new IT career against a backdrop of the looming Y2K and the dot com boom.
After an 18 month contract with Citibank, he got his first permanent role with Goldman Sachs where he stayed for five years.
"I progressed through three roles there, working my way up to be the manager of trade floor support for fixed income and equities sales and trading,"
He eventually left to expand his experience outside Goldman's proprietary systems and to chase his future wife to Australia. Later he and his wife returned to London where Richard spent three months working for a local council while seeking his next permanent job.
In 2006 he joined BNP Paribas, as desktop services manager for the UK, responsible for 5,000 end-users and 110 staff. The role revolved around a large RFP (request for proposal) change management project which gave Richard good commercial exposure.
Two and a half years later he made the decision to return to his wife's home country.
"I could see the markets were becoming weaker and decided it would be a good time to move country earlier rather than at the end of 2008, as originally planned.
"I come from a technical background and I felt I needed more formal education in the fundamental skills of finance, business planning and strategy. It's the right crossing point in my career to undertake that education. I've been taking exams almost every year during my career, adding other professional accreditations to my CV and continually training in HR, investment banking and in technical areas, as well as in soft skills such as communications and negotiations."
It was all worthwhile, but none of it was enough to step up into the more senior roles he was interested in. The next step, he says, requires a really good business background which he plans to achieve with his MBA.
