Master of Applied Management student story

Nelly Asmatullayeva says NMIT was an “attractive” option when she was looking to level-up her career in education with a management qualification.

She already had degrees in linguistics, education, and teaching English as a foreign language, and 16 years’ experience working for educational institutions in her home country of Kazakhstan.

But she wanted to take her career in a new direction and study management in an English-speaking country.

Her research led her to the Master of Applied Management at NMIT, a comprehensive 15-month programme that prepares students, of all backgrounds, for management roles.

Nelly says she was attracted to NMIT because the Masters programme didn’t require her to have a background in business or management.

The Master of Applied Management is “open entry” which means it caters to degree holders from all industry backgrounds.

“What I liked about it was that they were open to any background,” Nelly says.

“Usually there are prerequisites and it's difficult to change the field, but here I could study management without having an undergraduate qualification in management. That was very attractive to me.”

She had some leadership experience working as a dean of a university and project manager for Erasmus+, a European Union education programme.

But she was seeking a new challenge and wanted to formalise her experience with a management qualification.

The Masters programme is well-suited to all degree holders who want to progress into management.

Students can take specific courses to major in Applied Management, International Business, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Business Analytics, and Healthcare Management.

Graduates will find career opportunities in a wide variety of sectors, including the public, private and not for profit sectors.

Nelly says she particularly enjoyed the Agile Management course in which students create a fictional business in a group and are required to overcome real-world challenges.

“It’s a really interesting course. We were involved in a mock project. We pretended to design a coffee cart business and did everything from creating the logo to how we’re going to organise the business, the prices, the drinks we’re going to offer, we even developed a mobile application and a chatbot, and we used the agile approach to manage that project,” Nelly says.

“That was exciting, partially because the team was amazing. We were six women from different backgrounds, and we complemented each other. That was a great course for me. I learned a lot.”

She says she had experience with “waterfall” project management in the education sector, but learning agile methodologies, like “scrum” and kanban”, showed her new ways of working.

Students also have the freedom to choose which topics they focus on during the programme, so they can build upon the knowledge and skills they already have.

“I try to do all the assignments somehow related to the field of education,” she says.

“It’s very good that students can actually choose the topic, but apply what they’ve learned from the course in this topic.”

Nelly says she’s excited to apply the communications skills and management methodologies she’s learned during the programme in the education sector.

The Masters programme can be studied fully online, face-to-face at the Nelson campus, or a combination of both and there are several intakes throughout the year. To learn more, visit nmit.ac.nz/business