Kristy
McKenzie

Kirsty graduated from Nottingham Business School in 2013.

Current role: Global Innovation Manager at RSM International

Why did you choose NTU, Nottingham Business School and your course?
I chose NTU as I really liked the feeling the first time I visited the campus, having explored many universities in my selection process, NTU just felt right. My course Marketing Design and Communications has since been discontinued, however, I chose it as at the time the course was very unique to any other university Marketing courses. It had strong ties to the industry with a placement year and a focus on design and communications.

How would you rate the support available at NTU and NBS? Think of both your course staff, student support, the employability team and global lounges. How did they help you?
While at NTU I found the employability team very helpful especially for CV reviews and supporting me with job applications. The course staff on the whole were brilliant and encouraged me to think critically and challenge some of the existing concepts and models we had been learning.

Did you get involved with any opportunities at Nottingham Business School? How did these opportunities improve your experience?
For my second and final year at NTU, I volunteered at the Students in Classrooms literacy initiative that the university run. For two days a week a few hours at a time, I would work with primary aged children who needed extra support with reading. It was rewarding and in my final year a needed break from writing my dissertation.

Did you gain any work experience during your course? If so, can you tell us whether it was a placement year, internship, volunteering or another opportunity? What the benefits have been of doing this?
I undertook a placement year in year 3 of my course. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The experience greatly improved my confidence, commercial awareness and allowed me to return to my university course with tacit knowledge.

What job are you currently doing and what does it involve?
For the last 3 years, I had been working with clients to help them solve some of their hardest business challenges by leveraging open innovation and crowdsourcing. I worked on a range of business challenges from identifying new products and services to minimising the impact of climate change, to uncovering solutions to why a pharmaceutical drug on the market was having adverse effects in patients.  This involved me working with clients to establish their innovation and crowdsourcing strategies, fostering strategic relationships with partners and clients, educating and leading workshops on open innovation, project managing the open innovation process end to end, from identifying the root cause of the business challenge, through to ensuring that the client received the solution and the solution’s creator was rewarded for their idea. Having gathered rich experience of advising clients and implementing their innovation and crowdsourcing strategies, I recently decided to take the leap and move in-house working for RSM international as their Global Innovation Manager. This role enables me to own business challenges and support the development of solutions with the outcome of creating new products and services.

How has your experience at NBS helped you in your current role? Are there any skills you gained at NBS that you now use every day?
In my final year, I chose to do my dissertation on open innovation, a very niche topic area but one I found very interesting. The understanding of how companies can leverage external knowledge provided great foundation knowledge when I later chose to work with startups and work for Wazoku, an open innovation and crowdsourcing company.

What would your advice be to those who have recently graduated and are looking for roles?
Be persistent and creative. It’s not always easy to find a role, however, don’t be afraid to slide into people’s LinkedIn DMs, attend networking events, and if you’re interested in smaller companies actually pick up the phone and speak to their recruiters/directors.

What has been your career highlight so far?
I have been fortunate enough to have several highlights within my career, however, a highlight that was hugely rewarding was when I worked for a social enterprise and business accelerator in Uganda in 2017. I was leading a programme where I managed 17 volunteer consultants who worked with local micro-enterprises on developing their businesses and provided the opportunity to gain funding. This experience was richly fulfilling and also taught me a great deal; having been in a new county and environment, leading a large group of people but also navigating a different culture – I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. At the end of the programme, 93% of the businesses we had been supporting that pitched for a microloan received funding, and the two startups who joined with only business ideas had operating businesses, strong in the trained business acumen.