Today we are speaking with Kristin Zecca one of the Directors of Executive Education at the Sloan School of Business at MIT. Kristin will tell us about her career journey beginning with educational technology, earning her MBA from Simmons College of Management, positions in sales and creation of leadership programs to her current role in Executive Education at MIT. She will describe her role in open-enrollment working with some very high profile international programs that include coaching and entrepreneurship along with her many connections with companies around the world. She will also share what her current goals are and how she is working on creating new programs and what she sees as the future of Executive Education.
“Out of college my journey was started working in the fields of educational technology. I worked for a company really at the dawn of online learning in the late 1990s that was helping people teach and learn with technology.”
“For the past three years I’ve been a Director of Executive Programs at MIT. My role as a leader in the department is working on a portfolio of open enrollment programs and doing business development and bringing new corporations in MIT to design custom programs for their top leadership to help them address the business challenges of today.”
“One of our flagship programs is the Entrepreneurship Development Program led by Bill Aulet. He is very well-known in the world of entrepreneurship and we usually have a hundred and thirty people from across the world in attendance. They come to MIT for one week to participate in building a business plan and working on a diverse team and creating a plan within a week to go through the learning experience of launching a business.”
“I felt like I had the preparation and skills to be successful in my role. I think in the past three years it’s really about learning the environment that you’re in and the different layers of the university and how to work successfully within it and how to engage corporations and have successful partnership with universities.”
“I think the pace within which things happen at MIT in Exec Ed is actually fairly quick for the Exec Ed department. And how we move, we structure ourselves to be pretty agile and how we can work with customers.””
“We’re typically working with a large corporation that’s global. It has a particular business challenge that they need to solve. They might be launching their company unit in only part of the world. They might be managing a change or shift in leadership. They may be launching a strategic initiative focusing on sustainability or innovation or particular area where MIT has expertise.”
“I am attracted to being in Executive Education because I love to learn. I would say it’s good to be someone who is open to learning and new ideas.”
” [At the Conference on Management and Executive Development] I really enjoyed the broadness of the audience and the participants playing different roles really at different types of schools, in different geography, all over the U.S., some international.”
Links:
MIT Sloan Executive Education homepage
Kristin Zecca LinkedIn Profile
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