Part-time MBA proves right design for Libby

For Libby Ward-Christie (MBA 2006), completing her MBA developed the skills she needed to pursue a new career helping to solve entrenched community problems.

As Head of Investment & Advisory at social enterprise development organisation Social Traders, Libby today helps organisations find better ways to achieve and contribute to sustainable social impact and change.

“I decided that I needed to do an MBA because I really felt that I needed to understand business,” Libby explained.

“My real interest was in working with organisations to help solve both social and environmental problems.”

Libby’s road to her MBA and subsequent career in social enterprise and improving communities was set early on when she did an undergraduate double degree in art/science, a Zoology degree with honours and then a Master of Landscape Architecture.

While she completed her MBA part-time, Libby worked at Manningham Council in Melbourne’s east where she’d been in various planning and management roles.

Libby said she chose Melbourne Business School because she wanted to get the best possible degree she could while balancing study and work.

“I was giving a lot of my time and energy and I really wanted to be somewhere where I knew there was going to be a quality result,” she said.

In fact it wasn’t just work and study that Libby was concentrated on during this time. She and her husband also decided to start a family and she became pregnant during her studies and was almost at her due date when she graduated.

Libby confessed that when she enrolled, she was worried that she would be out of place among her fellow students, whom she’d assumed would all come from a commerce and business background.

“I was so wrong. There was so much diversity in that room when I first started and it continued throughout my degree,” Libby said.

“There were physios, there was a vet, I wasn’t the only landscape architect/environmental planner either.

“We were all applying our lens and our technical skills and starting to learn how those things could be raised up and applied in different ways to make better organisations and make the places where we worked more successful.”

Libby was the recipient of the 2016 Outstanding Recent Alumni Award at Melbourne Business School’s recent Annual Alumni Dinner.