Rosalina Abu Bakar: Country Director

Rosalina Abu Bakar

MSc Engineering Business Management (Mayalsia), 2009

Based in:

Malaysia

First job:

Assistant Lecturer at a private university

Strangest interview question:

Not being asked any questions, just seated at a cafe with a menu on the table and the interviewer just quietly seated in front of me. Strange silence.

Advice for current students:

Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. Don't stop!

Ambitions for the future:

Make myself replaceable and move into a Board and Advisory position, and continuously teach back.

Country Director, Emeritus Institute of Management

Describe your current role and what attracted you to it.

All throughout my life, my career has always been regimented in a traditional growth trajectory, climbing the corporate ladder a step at a time. In 2018, I disrupted myself by stepping away from the corporate world into a local boutique startup environment and testing the impact I could make when I wasn’t bureaucratically confined. It surprised me how many more skills I was able to develop and how much greater an impact I could make when I wasn’t limited by a job description.

In late 2021, when Emeritus, an executive education edtech unicorn, approached me to lead on its new B2B market venture in Malaysia, it was the realisation of my dream to challenge myself by bringing and nurturing this innovative company in the market. My role as a pioneer is about serving a purpose, it goes beyond serving my own personal career growth.

What’s your favourite part of the role?

Back then, in early 2022, being invited to participate in a tender bidding exercise was already a market acknowledgment that we had a solution to be reckoned with and classified as a potential value-add. By mid-2022, we started winning deals, multi-cohort, multi-year, multi-tier, and multi-modality.

Suddenly, from being a single-handed person, I had grown the team dedicated to the market to nearly 10 people within my 3+ years of tenure. It is a direct attestation to the growth of the business. Today, the team has been recognised as a gold-standard, best-in-class team, regionally positioned as the Centre of Excellence for delivery and execution, and is potentially growing to 50–70 team members strong in the next three years.

What are the key skills you learnt at Warwick that have helped you with your career to date?

Business Strategy, Market Positioning, Critical Thinking, Operational Excellence, Systems Thinking, Project Management, Financial Analysis, Value Proposition, Collaborative Action.

Did you have a specific career path in mind when you chose to study at Warwick?

I wanted to bridge my gap as an engineer by profession. I was very far from the business, yet my work impacted the business directly. I wanted to be in the management line and not the back-end technologist line of career growth.

What top tips do you have for Warwick graduates who would like to work in your sector?

Don't confine yourself to what your role and job description tell you to do.

Add value all the time.

You must love and be passionate about learning and growing yourself; only then are you authentically in the business of growing others.

What has been your greatest career challenge to date and how did your experience and skills help overcome it?

When the team grows too fast, it’s about how to get everyone integrated. As a digital-first organisation, we are nomads, working from anywhere with no physical office. Fostering human connection has been my greatest challenge to date. I am still in the process of setting the tone, culture, processes, and systems without losing sight of the business, while keeping the momentum and uplifting motivation. For this, I’m glad I took a module on organisational behaviour, and that I still kept the textbook!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given in relation to your career?

Everyone is human, and position is just a temporary chair. Remove the chair out of the equation and always ask who you are as a person, what value you bring to this world and why you are needed?

What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were applying for jobs?

That I was hired into an experimental market, not as someone from a ‘sales’ background, but as a true practitioner in HR and Learning & Development, bringing a different lens to the way we approach the market.