From Engineer to Global Leader: How the EDHEC EMBA Transformed Manon Servais’s Career | EDHEC Business School

Rethinking Career Ambitions: A Turning Point

When a new CEO took the helm of the pipeline operator where Manon Servais had worked for four years, the company began discussing diversification and international expansion. Just a few years later, words that had hitherto been absent from her daily vocabulary, such as merger and acquisition (M&A) and restructuring, started to be used in management meetings.

For Servais, who has an engineering degree but had taken on business development responsibilities during her time in the business, these discussions triggered a lightbulb moment: “I thought, okay, now I need to go a level up,” she says.

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That level up, she decided, would be an Executive MBA, since the part-time programme structure allowed her to continue to work while studying. Her employer had guaranteed to fund part of the fees.

One question remained for the Parisienne: where to study?

Servais examined the options available to her in the Paris region.

Quickly, the 16-month EDHEC Executive MBA (EMBA) programme stood out for several reasons, including affordability (particularly important since she was funding an important part of the fees from her own pocket) and diversity in the cohort.

Crucially, EDHEC’s programme could be personalised to hit all the executive-level skills and knowledge she needed, such as entrepreneurship, financial modelling and innovation management.

“There was also a lean start-up module which was very important to me,” she says, talking of the methodology designed to create and manage start-up development and ensure the product ends up in customers' hands faster.
 

Learning in Real Time: Practical Skills, Personal Insight

Her decision made, Servais enrolled for the March 2021 intake at EDHEC's Paris campus.

With much of the world still cloaked in COVID-19 restrictions during those first few months, she had permission to leave her house to attend lessons. In a bubble with her cohort, she reflects on how special that time was.

 “We were lucky to have this authorisation to go to school,” she says.

She quickly slipped into a rhythm of balancing her work with her studies, including the four days (Wednesday to Saturday) spent once a month on campus.

She found that she was immediately putting what she was taught into practice. “The learning process was definitely faster; in some cases from the classroom on Saturday to the office on Monday!” she says.

“That’s why the EMBA is such a good format.”

The courses didn’t disappoint, either — particularly the all-important lean start-up module. 
“I was expecting a lot from it — and I got a lot,” she says.

Entrepreneurship was another firm favourite, even if it was stringent. “It took a lot of time because you have to form an idea, put it on the market and test it with consumers,” she says.
 

A Global Leap: Applying the EMBA to Career and Life

Not all lessons were from the business modules, however. There were those learnings which came from the life experiences her cohort had to share.

“One of the things I was looking for from this experience was to meet people from different backgrounds because I needed to step out of my comfort zone and discover other business models and mindsets,” she says.

Her classmates came from around the world and from the spectrum of industry. “They brought a lot of new concepts to the table that could be applied to other industries. It was fantastic to have such an array of diverse profiles and it’s somewhere EDHEC does a great job.”

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The other key lessons came from uncovering her leadership style and an ability to self-analyse and self-reflect. “One of the main takeaways is that, after this kind of experience, you know yourself better,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting that."

As part of the EMBA, students take leadership modules and benefit from coaching sessions. “At the start, I was a bit reluctant as I wasn’t sure they were relevant to my goals, but those were particularly important sessions of the EMBA,” she says.

“I now better understand my weaknesses, my strengths and how to leverage them from a professional standpoint.”

Had you told Servais where her career would take her in the two short years since she graduated in 2023, she would barely have believed you. 

She had enrolled in the EMBA with no intention of leaving a role she had found incredibly fulfilling until that point. But the EMBA opened her eyes to a world of possibilities and she was soon fielding calls from recruiters. An opportunity to join Arkema, a speciality chemical company, as Global Business Manager for Glass Coatings gave her full Profit and Loss (P&L) responsibility and management of a global team for the first time in her career.

The role was a springboard for her current position, a return to the engineering sector as Global Service Strategy & Innovation Director at Vallourec, a world leader in premium tubular solutions, serving critical sectors such as offshore oil and gas, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and power generation.

“I’m in charge of innovation for services. I look at how to develop services we can bring around our products to fulfil the group’s premiumisation strategy, which is value over volume,” she explains.

“Vallourec is focused on enhancing the value it brings to the market. Integrating services has become a key pillar of the corporate strategy, and through my role in innovation management, I’m actively contributing to that shift.”

Servais says the lessons taught during her EMBA have become second nature.

“In this position, I’m mixing marketing, lean start-up, innovation and finance every day,” she explains. These are concepts that I really strengthened during the EMBA. It's powerful to have such a macro view. I feel comfortable dealing with a lot of different information coming from different sources and departments in order to give the right insights to the executive leadership.”

Proudly EDHEC: Lasting Bonds and Words of Advice

The added bonus? The friends for life that Servais has made from the EMBA. “We created very solid links and those links are still there,” she says.

She had known from discussions with previous alumni to expect such strong bonds to form. “There is a strong feeling of belonging at EDHEC, and you can feel it,” she says. “We are proudly EDHEC, and everybody embodies that.”

Does she have any advice for anyone in a similar situation who is considering enrolling in an EMBA?

“If you are afraid of the workload, I can tell you that you’ll also have a lot of fun, which helps to balance things out. Plus, everybody's in the same boat, so there is a strong support network.

“My only advice is to go for it! You will make friends. You will create a network. You will understand yourself better. Even if you don't expect it, you will grow — both professionally and personally.”

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