Looking to excel in your role?
What motivated you have a career change and what were you hoping to get out of the course?
I was probably in that situation that many managers that come from a professional background are in. You advance your career based on your professional skills, but at a certain point to excel in your role while you’re still required to exercise your professional skills, in my position be a lawyer, success becomes a little bit more around managing people, driving projects, dealing with risks, promoting change, engaging with the various boards and executive teams and bodies that make up a larger organisation.
So, I was really looking for a course or a qualification that would help me conceptually put a lot of that together and understand the interactions between all those different parts that were part of the organisation I worked within but were outside of my direct role.
My manager recommended that I have a good look at Governance Institute of Australia. He’d been through the course himself and highly rated it. So, after looking at the course and speaking with some other people, I thought it definitely ticked those boxes in terms of giving that broader context to governance within organisations.
If you are interested in exceling in your role like Andrew, you can find out more about postgraduate education here.
What were your key takeaways for the course?
Applied learning right from day one. For me the biggest takeaway or the biggest highlight from the course was starting to develop that critical awareness and critical thinking of how all the independent attributes of governance, that you might deal with on a day-to-day basis, all string together to provide that overall governance framework.
You get to a certain point within an organisation, especially in management roles and it becomes just as much around engaging with other areas of the organisation as it does performing your own role. So the course through Governance Institute really did give me that end-to-end view. So right from determining strategy, identifying and managing risks, financing considerations, compliance controls, performance measures and reporting that whole end-to-end understanding of how something might be developed and propagated through an organisation.
What advice would you give to someone considering the course?
The course is incredibly valuable, especially if someone is moving into support roles for boards or executive bodies, or even within management roles when to be effective in your role you need to advocate and work with those bodies.
Andrew is the 2020 Dux of Graduate Diploma of Applied Corporate Governance and Risk Management Class and Ian Falconer Award recipient.