Suzanne’s career change from nursing after an MBA

Is an MBA good for a career change? Many UQ alumni would say so. And Suzanne Wood is one of them.

Suzanne had a distinguished career as a registered nurse working in both the private and public health sectors, in general medical to acute stroke, neuroscience and aged care. After progressing from frontline nursing to clinical education and health management roles, she started to feel constrained in her ability to contribute to influential decision-making to improve the healthcare sector.

“I felt like I was at a crossroads, both professionally and personally,” she says.

“I’d reached a point of minimal returns for effort. I needed some way to jump the ladder and have more influence. There are limited pathways in nursing in terms of how far you can progress past the mid-management level and truly being an influential decision-maker."

"I really wanted to at least contribute my opinion in a way that affected and improved patient outcomes.”

So, Suzanne enrolled in the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program at UQ. She hoped combining her MBA and nursing experience could lead to more rewarding career opportunities.

Funding a career change from nursing

When applying for the MBA, Suzanne also applied for an MBA scholarship. She found the scholarship application process helped her better understand her career aspirations.

Suzanne spoke about personal challenges she’d faced in her work, detailing how she overcame cultural and educational barriers during an initiative she led to achieve significant and quantifiable results for her community.

“In my video submission I spoke about my passion for helping others, as it had influenced many of my career choices, and I explained why I thought the MBA was the next natural step in my life,” she says. 

“My personal work initiative had involved introducing an infection transmission minimisation program into an aged care facility. The collective staffing group of roughly 160 people all needed to be upskilled. This meant I needed to train, educate, monitor and evaluate the performance of a highly diverse group of staff.”

Suzanne achieved this by designing highly engaging training materials and incorporating them into the everyday work culture, creating cultural change through leadership, rather than management.

“In retrospect, this was an incredibly timely and critical piece of work," says Suzanne.

"The pandemic hit less than a year later, and because of the program, these facilities were better informed and able to provide safe care to the residents.” 

When considering her career change from nursing, Suzanne says:

“I believed I could combine my insider frontline work experience nursing and MBA business acumen and contribute to pragmatic design-making in the health sector, ultimately achieving better outcomes for our community.”

More than financial support

As a single mother of one, receiving the MBA Student Scholarship - Women gave Suzanne the opportunity to keep working while studying full time and complete the program as soon as possible.

“The MBA scholarship alleviated the burden of resigning from a job I loved to enrol in the full-time intensive program,” she says. 

“UQ is globally recognised and a highly competitive MBA program, so getting this scholarship also provided reputational benefits and career advantages in addition to the MBA letters after my name!

“Being awarded an MBA scholarship was an honour that signalled my personal work ethic and determination to succeed to employers.

“My dad, my mentor, always said a qualification is something that no one can take away from you. I feel the same way about the MBA scholarship – this achievement is with me for life.”

Overcoming self-doubt and building confidence 

Despite being excited about the program, Suzanne initially found herself struggling with feelings of self-doubt.

“I didn’t feel like I had the business acumen I assumed all the other MBA candidates did,” she says.

“Much of this fear was because I came from an industry that was not a standard pathway to the MBA. There were some students in the program who were CEOs, and I wasn’t coming from that standard business background.”

“I felt like at any moment someone would turn around and tell me they had made an admissions mistake and I didn’t belong there.”

However, once enrolled, Suzanne learned it wasn’t necessary to have a business background to excel. In fact, the diversity of the UQ MBA cohort and range of professional experience is one of the program’s strengths.

She found peers in more traditional business careers weren’t immune to imposter syndrome when starting the program either. The MBA gave her the tools to manage these common feelings.

“It was great to grow our skills and confidence together and learn how to articulate our value,” says Suzanne.

“A big part of the UQ MBA is teamwork, and a reason for that is to share the learning experience with other students. I found enormous professional and personal value in learning from the people you’re studying with.  Once I embraced the experience, I knew I belonged because I had something to offer them too.”

Suzanne's career change after the MBA

During her studies, Suzanne also learned that switching careers while pursuing an MBA was more common than she first thought. 

In fact, UQ MBA Director Associate Professor Nicole Hartley has revealed 80% of UQ MBA students change career during their studies or shortly after graduation. This mirrors a wider national trend. While the job mobility rate has stabilised since the pandemic, 1.1 million people changed jobs during the year ending February 2024 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Job Mobility, 2024).

After completing the MBA, Suzanne used her skills and experience in the health industry to launch a consulting career. She started a 12-month project with the Royal Flying Doctors Service, Queensland Transformation Program.

“The UQ MBA was an amazing opportunity to take my health background and apply it in a new way,” she says.

“As I moved into this new world, the MBA gave me a plethora of new skills, knowledge and a level of comfort I didn’t have previously.”

Shortly after, Suzanne joined management consulting firm BDO Australia, leveraging what she calls her “first career evolution”. She has continued to accelerate her success in other management consulting roles ever since.

“It’s overwhelming how much the UQ MBA can expand your horizons and so quickly”, she says.

“The MBA gave me new skills and greater self-awareness to design and craft the rest of my life.”