How an Executive MBA helped a gendarme climb the ranks

I was born in Strasbourg, in the east of France, close to the German border. I was maybe 13 or 14 years old when I first thought about joining the Gendarmerie, one of the oldest institutions in France. It is an armed force, composed of 100,000 personnel and 40,000 reservists, which is dedicated to home security missions in times of peace, crisis and war situations. I wanted to wear a uniform and be a representative of my country, but I was also attracted by gaining physical skills and the ability to move all over the world.

I joined the armed forces in 2006, which is when I attended an officer’s academy close to Paris and trained in logistics and human resources. My speciality was to manage these functions, especially in crisis situations. I have worked in war zones as well as in European countries, where I mainly trained other military personnel.

Being an HR manager in the military can be very emotionally difficult, such as in the case of the death of people that you are managing. It can be tough when you are the only leader in a war situation, abroad with a small team, and have to react to face changing situations. Things can change very quickly — it’s very special being abroad.

The decision to do the Global Executive MBA at Neoma, in northern France, was a choice I made together with my manager. In the Gendarmerie, careers are divided into two parts. To move to the next stage, one must obtain a second-level higher education diploma. After 15 years in the armed forces, I felt I had mastered many aspects of my professional domain and so I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.

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I also believe that we in the armed forces are going to be having increasingly tight links to the private sector, and so we need to be more entrepreneurial and bring fresh ideas into an institution that has been around for several centuries.

I chose Neoma as it has a very good reputation in France and I wanted to do a course that was in English.

There were approximately 15 students, and we would meet for one week — or five to six days — every month. It was part-time but a huge amount of work — with my classmates, we estimated 15-20 hours per week to do our coursework. I started a new job around the same time and had two very young kids, so it was a busy year — or year and a half, if we count the final report we wrote at the end.

There were many great courses on so many topics: global leadership, marketing strategy, entrepreneurship mindset, agile business, strategic management, value creation, ethics, sustainable development, supply chain and resilience, as well as other social skills. I have particularly good memories from the international finance course. It was a brand new topic for me, which I found quite complex, but we had a great teacher and I discovered that I was actually skilled in the subject.

At the start of my Global Executive MBA, I was promoted and joined the national headquarters of the Gendarmerie, close to Paris. I became the deputy head of the office in the HR department and programme director of digital transformation for human resources. I’m managing a team that is developing a dashboard to better manage human resources and make strategic decisions. We have about 140,000 people and our budget for human resources is €8bn — it’s quite significant.

I have applied what I learnt about digital transformation, ethics and management in my relations with younger colleagues and my ability to motivate them — but where I really feel a difference is when I talk to my own top managers. Something changed in my relation to them, which I think is because I understand them better. This meant I got better at convincing them. I really believe there was a big change in my ability to keep track of the direction of things — and to explain my work, vision and strategy.

The Executive MBA wasn’t just a learning experience, it was about personal empowerment. When I discussed it with my cohort colleagues, they felt the same — there was a real change after this one-year programme. It’s not just a business school, it’s a life experience.