Partner Sites


Logo BusinessBecause - The business school voice
mobile search icon

Global Recession Gives Bath MBA Marketing Career In The UK

Juhi Bhatia grew up with her family's small stationary business in Moradabad, India. But after an MBA in the UK at Bath, she plans to make it big in the marketing industry.

Wed Nov 27 2013

BusinessBecause
Bath MBA Juhi Bhatia has always been surrounded by business. When she was growing up in India, her father ran a wholesale stationary company in the small city of Moradabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

"My father is a shop owner and, earlier, we had our own printing press in a small town near New Delhi," she tells me. "The whole of my family have been very into the technical side of industry."

But Juhi's path to an MBA in the UK was not so straightforward. Her father may have been an entrepreneur, but she was interested in technology. She had studied engineering at university before making the transition into business management - like many MBAs do.

"My dad doesn’t even know what electrical engineers do," she jokes.

"I have always had an interest in science since I was a child. I thought I would go into tech-orientated studies because I was really fascinated by technology.

"Soon after finishing my degree, I was sleeted by a company and then went onto three to six month's of training."

But there was another twist in the tail. Juhi worked as an executive in New Delhi for almost two years, but was mixing marketing and engineering in one pot. She was producing market analysis from a technology point of view, but her colleagues encouraged her to become a marketer.

"It was quite change in my life," she says. "The people around me encouraged me to go into marketing and I thought management was also a very important thing for me to understand."

She went on to work in sales and marketing functions in the Noida and Bangalore areas of India for a further two years. But in 2008, she up-routed and moved to the UK with her husband, joining the British Government's Highly Skilled Migrant Programme.

Sadly for Juhi, it was at the height of the financial crisis and there were difficulties finding employment in a marketing sector in the midst of recession: "It was really difficult in the UK to get a good job and I didn’t want to compromise my skills or ability," she explained.

An MBA can help you launch a marketing career and Juhi used that time to search for business school programs in England. Without a job to return to, finance was an important factor. But location was even more crucial.

She joined the University of Bath School of Management MBA after receiving offers from two other leading business schools in the Britain. "When I came from India, the picture of the UK in my mind was very different," she says.

"I was living in Camberley, Surrey, which is very quiet. But when I visited Bath and spoke to people there, I liked the environment, the warmth the people showed me and the atmosphere.

"In terms of location, Bath is the best. It's very centralized and the city centre is quite close to the campus."

Bath is consistently at the top of the MBA Rankings and this year was ranked #2 by The Economist's list of full-time UK programs. It is considered first in the UK for salary increases and even during a time of recession four years ago, Juhi was inspired to enroll after speaking with Bath's professors.

During a difficult personal time, they offered her flexibility. "The professors were very warm speaking to me and I was just opened up," she explains.

"I thought it would be difficult for me managing that personal time, but the professors and staff helped me to understand. They gave me different scenarios so I could do my best and would be able to utilize the opportunity.

"They were helping and supportive. They told me to go for it."

Juhi loved the strategy, operations and risk-management modules and praises the skills Bath gave her in understanding marketing strategy and international business. She moved to the UK in-part to gain international exposure and, a few month's after graduating, got a job at ABB - a top technologies firm in England.

A recent survey shows that marketers in the UK earn up to £77,000 and a staggering 72 per cent of female marketers received a payrise in 2012.

Many MBAs credit their study to helping them reach the top of the industry. An MBA isn't considered essential for all in the function, but for Juhi, it was.

She used a summer internship with Rotork Controls in the city of Bath to boost her marketing strategy skills.

"It was essential because I was working in a more tech role back in India," she explains. "But now, I wanted to be into business strategy and marketing. It helped me to get the job I'm at now.

"The careers team at Bath were helpful in getting me a six-month internship and and that opened up the options for different jobs related to the same industry. It was really helpful."

Juhi is merging marketing and strategy at ABB and uses the skills she learnt at Bath to produce market intelligence and analysis for the company's Power Systems UK branch.

Two years into the job and she is going from strength to strength. The recession could have put her transition in jeopardy but, instead, was the unlikely motivation she needed to take up an MBA.

As the economy has stabilized, so too has Juhi's career. Her path now is a world away from that small stationary business in India.

With a Bath MBA, she has achieved much after setting out from Moradabad.

RECAPTHA :

17

07

fd

46