Future Leaders' Luncheon at the Shard

On Thursday 13th July, SBS academic Carol Masters accompanied Ben Lewis-Meade (BSc Management with Entrepreneurship), Trang Le, Angga Mora and Di Zhang (MSc Accounting and Finance) to a Future Leaders' Luncheon at the Shard, hosted by CPA Australia.

The luncheon was first held last year and was so successful that CPA Australia are hoping to make it an annual event. The idea behind the lunch is to provide a platform to connect students with business leaders so they can learn from them and start to build a network which will help them in their future career.

The event included a panel comprised of Christopher Crellin, VP of Finance at Sony Music Entertainment, Aaron Musca, CFO of IKEA Ltd, Kristy Eden-Green, Finance Director of State Street and Ricci Beier, Founder of IKKI Small but Brave. The panel was chaired by Philip Sourry, Non-Executive Director of the Salvation Army. After each panel members had told the story of how they achieved their career goals, students were able to ask questions.

Angga Mora commented that he was delighted to gain insight and advice from business professionals from several industries and accounting organisations.

CPA Australia have a significant presence in the Asia-Pacific region and we are working with them to offer our students further employability events in the future. It is hoped that a representative from their Guangzhou office will be visiting Southampton in October to advise Chinese students on how they can prepare themselves competitively for their careers back home.