Help your career take off

After more than ten years in finance, I was with Lebanon’s leading bank, Bank Audi, when it was bought by a fintech startup called Areeba. I left the bank to join them and I’m their finance and accounting manager with a team of seven.

It feels very different to work here compared with the bank. There are just 120 employees instead of 2,000, and I’m reporting directly to the CEO who is an ambitious and visionary leader. For me I feel like my career has really taken off and the sky’s the limit.

As part of this, I was looking for courses that would update my knowledge and take me to the next level. I heard about London Business School from my husband and through research I discovered it was one of the world’s leading places to study. My CEO encouraged me to go and achieve this Certificate and this made me eager to learn.

I’m based in Beirut and it was my first time studying abroad. I was so excited to travel to London for each of the four programmes as I had a purpose; I had a target. I wanted to get this Certificate.

The Certificate in Finance allows you to choose the programmes you want to do, to add value to your own career path. I chose Accounting and Financial Analysis, which gave me a recap of the essentials and made me evaluate my previous knowledge, before a deep dive into financial analysis. It taught us to look at the numbers in a financial statement as a story so that you can understand the real situation and financial position of the company.

The other courses were also powerful. The Valuation programme was taught by Professor Christopher Hennessy who was really impressive and professional. We were given many tools to evaluate a company such as multiples analysis and discounted cash flow. I would now be able to carry out a valuation myself if my company chose to acquire small businesses. And the Financial Strategies for Value Creation gave me lots of useful insights. Now I’m able to do finance from A to Z as I can link all these courses together.

The finance programmes gave me the technical knowledge but the Essentials of Leadership programme made me discover my strengths and weaknesses. I was really impressed by Professor Herminia Ibarra’s approach and the coaching sessions helped me to overcome many obstacles. They taught me not to fear anyone; not to be afraid to express my ideas; not to fear or hide weaknesses but to realise them and talk about them; and to connect with people. We were taught to reassess what others think about us and focus on positive thoughts. As a result, I feel I have much greater self-esteem and self-confidence.

The Certificate has helped me to think differently at work and to analyse in a fresh way. I now have weekly one-to-one meetings with my team members to understand their goals and realise their full potential. I try to be open with everyone and communicate openly. I want my team members to discover themselves and carry out initiatives by themselves, with the help of any coaching they need. And I have found that they feel happy and motivated by this and feel that they can grow faster than before. That makes me happy because if your team grows, your company grows too.

I want to say thank you to LBS. As well as teaching me many new methods, it has helped me to think differently at work and to analyse in a fresh way. I want to grow in my career and go a step further to be a director or CFO of the company and maybe work abroad – my company is currently expanding in Egypt, Jordan and UAE. I know that to be a leader you have to keep updating yourself, stay connected and expose yourself to international thinking and standards because the world is changing all the time. As they told us on the course, in the words of American executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, “What got you here won’t get you there”.