The names of this year’s CEMS Alumni of the Year awards were announced in late October. CEMS (Global Alliance in Management Education) is an international cooperation of universities, business schools, companies and non-government organisations. One university is selected from each country, Hungary has been represented by Corvinus since 1996.
Three out of 17,000 CEMS alumni have received awards
Erna Kindli, managing director of Bátor Tábor, received the Mid-Career Alumni of the Year award. This award category is for CEMS alumni who have already had 6 to 15 years of professional experience. Two other categories were also awarded: the junior alumni award with 1 to 5 years of professional experience and the senior alumni award with more than 16 years of experience.
The three award-wining alumni were selected from among nearly 17 000 alumni who represent 111 nationalities and work in more than 75 countries. Nominations can be submitted by members of the CEMS community – i.e. students, alumni, and holders of academic jobs –, for one candidate in each category. They are selected based on the extent to which they have made contributions to promote the CEMS values, i.e. global citizenship, cultural diversity, professional responsibility, professional accountability, and impact on society as a whole – according to Corvinus press release.
From Google to Bátor Tábor
Erna Kindli has completed the CEMS leadership training program (CEMS MIM) as a student at the Management and Organization study program of Corvinus University. CEMS Master’s in International Management (MIM) programme is ranked 12th in this year’s QS Masters in Management Rankings among 176 programmes, thus it is now included in the top 7 per cent of training offering management programmes globally.
Since 2017, Erna Kindli has been working as the managing director of Bátor Tábor (Camp of Courage in Hungarian) which provides life-changing experiences to seriously ill children and their families, and also to those families who have suffered the loss of a child.
Previously, she had worked for the cyber security company Tresorit for three years – and during that period, she received the “Young Leader of the Year” award in Hungary in 2016 – and prior to that she had started building her career at Google in London, where she spent five and a half years.
Erna Kindli is the second former Corvinus student who received alumni award from CEMS (Photo: Corvinus)
She changed because she felt what she was doing was not useful enough
[kiemelt]“What is unique about Erna Kindli is that, despite her excellent professional achievements in the competitive sector, she changed her career, focusing on social utility”[/kiemelt]
– Corvinus press release says.
„I felt an urge that what I was doing was not useful enough” – Erna Kindli said in an interview on the Corvinus website, explaining why she left competitive sector and started to work in non-profit sector.
“I was also musing about going to Asia and work for an international non-profit organisation as a professional volunteer, and I was even considering teaching English at an orphanage in the Philippines. Then a conversation with Péter Küllői, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Bátor Tábor Foundation and one of Hungary’s greatest philanthropists, changed everything. It turned out that he had been looking for a manager for a long time, and he offered the position to me. At that time, all I knew about Bátor Tábor was that it was an ethical organisation and what they do was professional and positive. I felt honoured to be invited” – she explained in the interview.
Erna Kindli is the second former Corvinus student who won CEMS alumni award
In 2019, the CEMS Mid-Career Alumni Award went also to a former student of Corvinus: Kinga Jentetics had received a doctorate degree in marketing from the university, and became the co-founder and managing director of the e-book sales online platform Publishdrive, which was launched in 2014, and in 2017 she was on the USA’s Forbes 30 Under 30, a list of the 30 most successful people under the age of 30.
