Brazilian born Andre Carbonieri has lived, studied and worked in the USA, UK, Spain and Switzerland but he chose the MIP Politecnico di Milano MBA in Italy to help him make a career switch.
Andre Carbonieri, MIP MBA 2011
Andre now works as a sales team leader at Amazon in Milan Italy, concentrating on consumer electronics, toys and baby products. Part of his role involves catering to sellers and distributors, and convincing them to sell online. We spoke with Andre and found out how he landed a role at one of the world's most successful internet businesses, and how he thinks the MIP MBA helped him.
He enjoys his role with Amazon because the Italian market for online retails is still growing. He said, “The trend of the market still shows more physical shopping activities and less online so it’s very exciting getting people online because that's the future, yet Italy remains quite traditional”.
“My role is challenging because we still need to convince sellers that being online widens their reach. They can sell abroad, not only in Italy. If they only have a physical shop, they can only sell to people in the area", he said.
Andre, 33, grew up in Brazil but left to attend Glion Institute of Higher Education, the first private university-level hotel management school in Switzerland. There, he gained his Bachelor in Tourism and Hospitality Administration. He also gained a second degree in Hospitality and Business Administration from Endicott College, USA.
Andre began his career in the hospitality industry working as an independent consultant for restaurants. He managed a wide range of their operations including public relations, revamps, negotiations with suppliers, selection and hiring, and improving finance processes. He decided to move to advertising and marketing because he felt that he wasn’t quite cut out for the hospitality business. “I’m more of a sales and strategy type of person and not very service oriented... to excel in the hospitality business you need to be cut out for that”, he said.
He moved into the advertising world and worked as a senior project director at Strategic Media Ltd., a marketing and advertising firm in the US and Spain. Whilst with the firm, he carried out projects around the world, in Greece, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Portugal, Yemen, the UAE, Colombia, Nigeria, Mauritania and Romania.
Andre chose the MIP MBA to advance his career. His family is originally from Italy so he already had that Italian connection. He was interested in staying in Italy for the forseeable future. He also felt the quality of teaching at MIP was the best he had come across in Italy. He said, “I was very impressed with the quality of professors. I thought the programme was the best in Italy. During the programme, you work on projects with real companies and we had lecturers who were top officers at big companies. We took lectures from the CIO of Procter and Gamble!"
Andre graduated from MIP in 2011. Since then he’s joined Amazon Italy with help from MIP’s career services. He said, “MIP career services put me in touch with Amazon. They referred me and I applied for the job.”
We couldn’t help asking Andre if he gets loads of Amazon vouchers. He told us that he does get an employee discount but nothing too significant. We ended the conversation to let Andre get back to his busy day. According to him, the holiday season is the busiest time for business with sales increasing by about 40 per cent!
Read more stories about students, programmes and alumni at MIP Politecnico di Milano here
Image attribution: Image adapted from a photograph on Akira Ohgaki's photostream, Flickr
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