Executive MBA Graduate Profile: Michelle Redfern, RMIT

Michelle Redfern emphatically describes herself, and her female peers and colleagues as,"fantastic, fabulous and feisty" - it does roll off the tongue rather nicely after all. Redfern, a 2015 executive MBA graduate from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia is one of the many women working towards building greater gender parity in business, especially at senior executive level.

Redfern's career follows a neat trajectory through the client management and services sectors. The final years of her corporate career were based at National Australia Bank where she led at the helm of multiple departments, heading consumer servicing, chairing the employee advocate group and leading the bank's supplier relationship management program.

Well established as a senior executive, Redfern chose to do an executive MBA (EMBA) because she wanted to launch her own business. Having the qualification, she says in recalling her reasoning, would give her the, "confidence to finally walk away from the corporate jungle," with the tools to give her business projects the best chance of succeeding. 

'Confidence’ is a word that starts to snowball in meaning as it threads its way through Redfern's responses. There is a globally recognized gender gap, and there's a gender confidence gap too, the two are often held to be intrinsically intertwined.

The stats speak up for the value of an MBA to women like Redfern. Only 4.2% of 2016's Fortune 500 companies in the US have a female CEO, yet around half of these women hold an MBA, indicating the qualification’s ability in helping leverage success.

Redfern, set on being her own boss, states that she chose RMIT because, even though she was a senior executive, she still wanted to expand on her existing business knowledge base. With her sights set on her own startup, she was also intent on acquiring the specific skills and know-how that would give her a steadier base from which to launch her business. RMIT's EMBA had come highly recommended by a friend, Redfern says. The program’s structure, content and, very importantly to her, its flexibility, all ended up working to her needs.