While Matthew Moskaluk, MM-A ’23, already had a background in data modelling and analytics, as he began considering leadership opportunities, he decided Ivey’s Master of Management: Analytics would be the right program to take his career to the next level.

“The Ivey MM-A provided a happy intersection between business focus and analytics that I was looking for,” says Moskaluk, a Senior Data Governance Manager at Manulife.

Courses on leadership, strategy and operations gave Moskaluk experience in areas he hadn’t had much exposure to in the past and led him to approach his work in a new way.

“The ability to see a situation through another lens and to supplement what I was already doing at work with the educational learnings was extremely helpful – as was being able to take a theoretical concept and put it into practice,” he says.

This became particularly useful as he moved into his current role and company halfway through the program, and found he was able to apply some of his MM-A learnings in real time.

When Moskaluk was setting up a governance council, for instance, he was able to rely on course learnings to bring the leadership together and to set the right goals and expectations.

“Obviously I had a way that I liked doing things in the past, but I was able to take specific concepts from my courses around what everybody was looking to get from these meetings and set up successful working groups,” he says.

“I’m also now able to have more open conversations with upper management and keep myself on track in terms of what the next steps in my career look like.”

But one of the biggest highlights for Moskaluk came in the form of the classmates he shared the program with, and the way they were able to rely on and learn from one another.

“It was such a great cohort. I still talk to a lot of them, and I feel like I could call upon any of my classmates, more than a year later. We all had similar goals, so we were able to bond quickly when we started the program and hit the ground running,” he says.

“Even though we all came from different careers and companies, everybody had a very similar mindset. Most of us were trying to move up in our careers, and that baseline that we were all starting from provided that understanding of each other.”

And while returning to school 10 years into his career was a bit of an adjustment, Moskaluk says, everyone at Ivey created an environment where his entire cohort could thrive.

“If you asked me three months before I actually submitted my application if I would ever go back to school, I would have said there was no way,” he says.

“Yet looking at where I'm at right now, it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.”