WPWP Insights

Donald Calcagni, Finance and Accounting Certificate

For Donald Calcagni, a WPWP Finance and Accounting Certificate was the route to professional self-discovery.

With a bachelor's degree in international studies and history and growing professional experience in wealth management for private clients, Calcagni thought he was heading toward a traditional MBA to enhance his qualifications.

WPWP's Finance and Accounting certificate seemed the ideal preparation for that goal, but during the program he realized, with the help of his professors, that he also needed legal training to meet his long-term professional aim of managing wealth for high-net-worth individuals.

The WPWP program clarified his ideas about what direction his career should take.

"It helped me realize that an MBA in and of itself is not what I need," he said.

The result is that he will be pursuing a joint JD/MBA program with a strong JD focus on tax law at Philadelphia's Temple University, starting in fall 2005.

"Now I know exactly where I need to go and what I need to do to get there," said Calcagni, 30. He is currently a Client Relationship Manager and Senior Financial Advisor with Mercer Global Advisors LLC, a Conshohocken-based firm for which he advises affluent families with an average net worth around $20 million.

His decision was helped by being among a group of students in the Wharton program who shared similar backgrounds and were, like Calcagni, asking themselves what next steps to take in their careers.

"A lot of us in the program had 3 to 5 years' work experience, and we were all thinking about MBAs, CPAs, or CFAs," he said. "It was nice to be in a program where a lot of people were asking the same kinds of questions as I was."

Arnaud Dubarry, Finance and Accounting Certificate

Arnaud Dubarry wanted to add experience of American business and accounting principles to his financial qualifications and decided that the Finance and Accounting Certificate offered by WPWP was the way to meet his goals.

Although he already had a degree in finance and several years of financial management experience with Johnson & Johnson, Dubarry recognized that he needed exposure to American financial practices and saw WPWP as a means to achieving that.

"I chose this track because it was a way to understand U.S. accounting principles and to learn the vocabulary of U.S. finance," said Dubarry, 31, a French citizen now living in Belgium and working as the worldwide controller of chemical operations at Janssen Pharmaceutica N.V., a unit of J&J.

He also saw WPWP as a way to gain a qualification that is easily recognized by U.S. employers and to enroll in an academic course that is more practical than those offered by many European universities.

"It was a totally different type of learning," he said. "It's so much more practical in the U.S. than in Europe."

The applicability of his classes to the business world was immediately apparent during his time at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, where he spent 18 months while commuting to Philadelphia in the evenings to take the WPWP program. "What I learned at night, I was able to use the day after," he said. "It allowed me to close the gap between my background and the U.S. working environment."

Now he feels more confident that he has the qualifications and experience to advance his career in the U.S. if opportunities arise. "It's an investment," he said from his office in Belgium. "If I want to go back to the U.S. in a couple of years, I can do that."

Anyone considering pursuing the WPWP Finance and Accounting Certificate should be well-motivated because they will be adding a significant workload to their regular working lives, said Dubarry.

But they will emerge with a qualification that will be respected by employers around the world, he said. "If you want to learn finance, Wharton is the best place."

Madeline Fazzalari, Business Essentials Certificate

Madeline Fazzalari had a degree in chemical engineering, 15 years of management experience, and a supervisory position at a major pharmaceutical, company but was concerned that she wouldn't progress beyond middle management unless she added some business training to her qualifications.

Realizing that she might not achieve her professional goal of running a division or an entire company led her to take the Business Essentials Certificate Program at Wharton Programs for Working Professionals.

"I wanted to move from mid-level to executive, but I didn't have the business and management fundamentals," said Fazzalari, 44, who is director of sales operations for the Princeton, N.J.-based pharmaceuticals research organization Covance Inc., where she has worked for 13 years.

The Wharton program offered Fazzalari the practical training in finance and accounting, law, marketing, human resources, risk management, and strategy that she was looking for. She completed the program in May 2004 with an enhanced understanding of management, and greater confidence that she was ready to take a more senior role in her organization.

Her new expertise quickly led to discussions with her managers about more senior positions at Covance — talks that were less likely to have taken place before. "I'm more confident having conversations with people," she said. "People recognize that I'm different now."

In particular, WPWP gave her an understanding of publicly traded companies that she didn't have before the course. "You have to know how to position yourself to appeal to the investment community," she said. "I knew nothing about publicly traded companies before beginning the program."

Following the Wharton course, Fazzalari has tripled the size of her department and enhanced her status at Covance. "It's about being seen in the organization as a leader," she said.

Daniel Oviedo Lopez, Human Resource Management Certificate

At WPWP, Daniel Oviedo Lopez discovered that human resources management was about much more than just managing the payroll and compiling an employee handbook. Lopez, 24, completed WPWP's Human Resource Management Certificate in May 2005, but his interest in the subject began much earlier when he was pursuing a bachelor's degree in business administration at a university in his native Paraguay. The human resources portion of the Paraguay degree, which he finished in April 2004, was based on the idea that the Human Resource department is an administrator of functions such as payroll and not much else. "It was not really approached properly," he said. "There was no appreciation for HR functions such as employee retention and the quality of human resources, and it ignored the idea that it's that department's job to make the company attractive as a place to work." His interest led him to WPWP, where courses such as organizational behavior, diversity in the workplace, and labor-management relations showed that human resources was a much broader field than his earlier program had indicated. WPWP's Human Resource Management Certificate, which does not require previous coursework in business or human resources, covers organizational dynamics, negotiation, and strategic implementation, allowing working professionals to apply classroom concepts to practical decision making in the workplace. Oviedo's completion of WPWP's Human Resource Management Certificate uncovered not only areas of the field he hadn't previously considered, but also aspects of himself he had not been aware of. "It helped tremendously," he said. "It really did change the way I see a lot of things."

Carolina Palacios, ELP Certificate Program, Marketing Certificate

For Carolina Palacios, a program at WPWP offered a rare opportunity to hone her marketing skills while improving her command of English as a business language.

Palacios came to Philadelphia from her native Argentina when her husband pursued an MBA at Wharton. She signed up for the Wharton-ELP Alliance program, which teaches English for business alongside a business certificate. Palacios chose marketing among the range of disciplines taught by WPWP.

The Marketing Certificate, which she completed in May 2005, gave Palacios an insight into a business she had run in Argentina, as well as adding to her knowledge of marketing.

The business, supplying eggs from her father's farm to personal customers, had grown first through word of mouth and then by promotions, email marketing, and brochures, all marketing tactics covered during the Wharton program. She reflected on her management style and acquired the skills needed for any future business opportunities through studying disciplines such as market research, consumer behavior, and marketing strategy.

"It was a solid introduction to the subject," she said.

The English-language component of the program improved her communications skills in a way that would enhance any future business interaction. It improved her vocabulary, polished her telephone conversation, and honed her presentation skills, ranging from slide presentation to simply making eye contact.

The techniques were practiced in class, an exercise that was particularly valuable for someone like Palacios who was working in a nonnative language. "It was the first time I did a presentation in English," she said.

Palacios, 27, recently applied for a job in the marketing department of an educational book publisher in Miami, a position she felt confident applying for as a result of her experience at WPWP. "I would not have applied for it before the program," she said.

"I enjoyed this program," she said. "I made some good friends in another country and did something productive for a year. It was a great opportunity."