Eugene Tkachenko

During his master’s degree in business management in Ukraine, Eugene Tkachenko, MMA '23 Candidate, developed an interest in marketing and marketing analytics.

He eventually moved to Canada and enrolled in a Salesforce Automation and CRM Analytics postgraduate certificate at Seneca College, which led to his first job in the field. But he knew if he wanted to move up in his career, he would need to continue to develop his broader business and leadership skills in additional to having a strong foundation in data.

“The technical skillset matters, but so does the application and the overall interpretation of the results,” says Tkachenko, now Lead, Marketing Sciences at Critical Mass.

“For me, it was quite important to understand how I can quickly analyze a situation, understand what the problem is, and identify the solution not just from an analytics perspective but also, for example, from a financial standpoint.”

Ivey’s Case Method and experiential method of learning has allowed Tkachenko to practice those skills within different classroom scenarios.

“There is a fusion of different opinions, cultures, backgrounds, as well as just the overall industry knowledge,” he says.

“The greatest value of programs like this is not only following the course curriculum, but also gaining other perspectives for understanding how, for example, one person may built and develop certain strategies and implement them versus other people. We have to know a bit about various industries in order to analyze the problems we’re given, and as classmates, we are stronger and better when we collaborate.”

Out of the courses he’s covered so far, Tkachenko says strategy and operations are among the ones he feels have been most eye-opening.

On the leadership side, he hopes the program will help him be an effective leader and manager to junior employees, whom he would like to help as much as others have helped him throughout his career.

“Many people helped – and keep helping me – as I move through my career, and as time passes, I'm getting more and more opportunities to pay the that back,” he says.

“The leadership course has helped me to get at different perspective in terms of how to communicate with people and to understand what interests they have so I can support them.”