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My names Alastair Thornton and I'm the Marketing Director at Thomson Local, effectively responsible
for the transition of print to digital with overall accountability for strategy and IT
as well as general marketing functions. I wanted to know I could go to a school which
is trusted, where previous students had got a good education and where it enabled them
to go further in their careers. I wanted to get a broader understanding of business outside
of my current experience. I'd say probably 85 percent, 85 to 90 percent were foreign
students which gave us a great understanding of how business is conducted elsewhere. Certainly
my experience had always been either in the UK or the States so it was great to understand
what's going on in China, Mexico, India and elsewhere. In terms of my future career and
how the MBA helped I think what it did was just rounded out a lot of the skills that
I already had, I think when you go into business all your experience is probably specialised
and the MBA really gives you a broad understanding whether it be finance, project management
or marketing just so you can understand wider business context rather than just what you've
always done. Birmingham is a great city to study an MBA at, from the campus and all the
facilities there are here, to Birmingham itself; great shopping, great restaurants, great nightlife,
pretty much everything you want you could find in Birmingham. Actually as it happens
at Birmingham I met my future wife, she was studying on the same MBA course she'd come
over from Mexico, so we've been married for seven years now and have a baby daughter Eloise.
I came back today to talk to the Communications students around how Thomson Local is using
communication to transition itself from print to digital and how to get buy-in from both
our customers and our staff. I think it's important that as an Alumni of Birmingham
I come back and help and give people real examples of what skills they'll have and how
they'll be able to use them going forward.