Jack Skerry: On Priorities, Perspective and Confidence

“it’s critical to be able to look at the same scenario from several different angles”.

Jack Skerry, MBA(L), (Class of 2021)

One thing is certain when pursuing a graduate degree and that is balancing your priorities becomes essential. Family, friends, career and studies all require our attention. CEGE reached out to a recent Dal Alum to hear how he managed it all.

Since graduating in 2021 with a Master of Business Administration (MBA), Leadership degree, Jack Skerry shares his thoughts from the experience and some great learnings from his time in the CEGE MBA program.

 

Jack Skerry

Now that I’ve had a bit of time to sit back and reflect on what I pulled from my experience with the Dal MBA program, 3 distinct learnings come to mind:

1. Figure out what’s important and prioritize it. Working full time (lots of travel), raising 2 very young children, and completing my MBA forced me to prioritize. The first step is to figure out what’s important. The next step is to prioritize the important stuff and deprioritize everything else.
2. You need to look at a scenario and consider it from multiple perspectives. Looking at a scenario from a singular perspective will likely leave out some information, it’s critical to be able to look at the same scenario from several different angles.
3. Learning is a skillset that needs practice, and this practice breeds confidence. For this reason, once I finished this program, I jumped outside of my comfort zone and took on a new role in a new functional area of business that I knew very little about.