Julian Dunn, 41, who wrapped up his first year of the Oregon Executive MBA program in June 2020, credits the program with his two recent promotions at PagerDuty, a San Francisco-based tech company.

Getting an MBA "demonstrated to leadership that I'm looking to take more of a leadership role," Dunn says. "Even among the projects that I work on now, they're becoming more strategic and more influential."

In a first for him, he recently briefed the c-suite team on go-to-market approaches for different target audiences and provided a recommended course of action to grow the business.

While Dunn eventually would like to start his own business, the immediate rewards of the program have been obvious. With an advanced career in the software industry, and an undergraduate degree in computer engineering, the program has allowed for collaboration across discipline and expertise—something Dunn felt he was lacking.

"To me it was really important to choose a program where I had the opportunity to develop relationships with people in different industries," Dunn says. "There's a lot of lessons that you can learn from other areas…and bring them back into the high-tech realm."