MBA Alumni Profile: Dmitry Chernobay, IEDC-Bled School of Management

20 years ago, Dimitri Chernobay embarked on his Executive MBA, but as he tells QS Top Executive, what he learnt in business school is still relevant today.

Dimitri Chernobay recalls the time, two decades ago, when he decided to embark on his Executive MBA. “That year, for me, started in the Soviet Union and ended in the new independent state of Ukraine. Therefore, the EMBA opportunity came in literally as a flow of fresh air in the then closed Soviet society and fully coincided with my continuous pursuit of breakthrough to modern academic knowledge and management skills.”

Today, Chernobay is the supervisory board member of the privately-owned company, Eurocar, one of the top three automotive producers in Ukraine, where he is in charge of strategy and international cooperation. He is also an independent director with the board of the state-owned Bank Kiev – career opportunities he believes are a result of his Executive MBA.

“My EMBA gave me an important tool of making strategic decisions in life and business through critical analysis and informed judgment while being based on the freedom of choice,” Chernobay says. “In this sense, my current job in 2011 is a product of my EMBA from IEDC in 1991.”

Although it may be 20 years ago since Chernobay was in the business school classroom, what he learnt as part of his Executive MBA is still relevant in the workplace today. “It’s like having learnt to ride a bicycle,” he says. “The “mind-set effect” of my EMBA studies will stay with me and impact my career path forever, while more specific technical knowledge and skills remained useful for up to five, seven or ten years depending on the subject. Most important for me was “learning to learn” in the context of a broad exposure to the wide spectrum of new knowledge.”

For a young person from the Soviet Union, Chernobay says the best part of going through the program was forming a totally new paradigm of concepts and views as well as developing a new mind-set of a broader and more liberal nature. However, he’s quick to point out that the Executive MBA is designed for a specific person in mind.

“I think it would be really useful to understand that EMBA is a program designed for fully-employed people in an active phase of their career with an obvious lack of time for a full-time program,” Chernobay says. “It’s not for school or university graduates, however bright they are.

“When you embark on an EMBA, to a certain extent, you are becoming Julius Caesar: you do two things simultaneously – studying and working. That’s simply clever. But the EMBA is definitely a program for those who have learnt to fly and are eager to become the first pilot, without quitting the joy of daily practicing in the sky.”

Chernobay may have been in the IEDC EMBA classroom long before the world of social media took off, but he’s maintained contact with some of his peers. “The main and greatest benefit of that social network came from an unique exposure to professional and cultural diversity and behavioral patterns of my class mates. I believe one can’t “borrow” those things from people in any other context. As of today, I maintain contacts with 2-3 persons from my class, as often as I can.”