Colorado Tech Online Students and Alumni
Meet Ron Windley
Executive MBA
Doing the Math
Proud father Ron Windley realized he needed to get to the next level in his career and salary … both for his own sense of accomplishment and for his two teenage daughters who were starting to look at going to college themselves. "Seeing I was soon going to have two girls in college at the same time really got me thinking. I knew I had to take myself up a level professionally to make it work financially. I thought getting an eMBA would be the way to do that."
Ron enrolled in Colorado Tech Online's Executive MBA degree program in the early fall of 2005. A realist, he was thinking it would take him a few years after graduation to get into a higher-paying, more challenging position. Well, Ron barely had to wait a year. Before he even graduated with his eMBA, Ron was hired as a director for a 500-employee company based in North Carolina. "I haven't even graduated yet and already this eMBA has paid for itself. This new position is the dream job I thought would happen a few years from now. This is the job I've always wanted and it has happened already."
Not only has Ron gone from a manager to a director level position (in taking the new job as a director, Ron left behind a Product Development Manager position), but he has also gotten himself onto the Vice President/Board member track. "This new company was looking for someone kind of young with fresh and different ideas. They have a few Vice Presidents who will be retiring in three to five years and they want to start grooming someone for those openings now. I was brought in for that purpose."
Ron says he never could have gotten this job without being in Colorado Tech Online's Executive MBA program. "I never would have been considered if I wasn't working on my eMBA."
But Ron's eMBA isn't just a piece of paper. "I'm quite certain lots of things in my Finance, Accounting, and Economics courses helped me in my interview. I couldn't have had the impressive interview I did if it wasn't for the education I'm getting at Colorado Tech Online."
Ron's Colorado Tech Online education didn't just help him earn the director position though; it has set him up to succeed in the position. While making the jump from a manager with two people reporting to you to a director overseeing 13 employees across three different plants could be intimidating, Ron says Colorado Tech Online has prepared him. "My previous educational experiences were all about memorization. You'd memorize something, regurgitate it back for a test and then forget it because you didn't necessarily understand it. This Colorado Tech Online experience has been a different type of learning. It is not memorization, but rather learning and understanding. You don't need to worry about forgetting things because you understand them. The required research and projects drive each point home."
Ron says one of the main reasons he decided on Colorado Tech Online for his eMBA was because of its curriculum. "Being on the technical side of things all of my professional life," - Ron's undergraduate degree was in Biology and most of his jobs have been engineering-related -"I had determined that my areas of weakness were finance, accounting, and economics. Colorado Tech Online has a curriculum that is really strong in these areas. Now I'm participating in management meetings and able to understand and talk about all of these things."
It turns out that Ron's eMBA is helping set his daughters up for college more than just financially too. "I think their seeing me study, and seeing what this degree has already helped me achieve helps them to be motivated to study. They have witnessed firsthand the value of an education."
"Pursuing this eMBA remains the single best decision I have ever made."
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