Zahra Ariyafar: "Careers are not linear; you have to find your own path."

What did you want to be, when you were a kid?

When I was about 9 or 10 years old, I wanted to be a police officer. My dad was in the police, so as a kid, I wanted to follow in his footsteps as I found it very honourable to be able to help people and bring safety to them. However, my dreams were soon shattered; at the time, they wouldn’t accept women into the police school. When they changed the rules a few years later, I was already on a different path.

You obtained a Master’s in Management, Technology and Economics (MAS MTEC) at ETH. What inspired you to study at ETH Zurich?

I left Iran after high school thanks to a Japanese scholarship to become an engineer. I did a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electronics in Japan. After my studies, I got a job as a Pre-sales Systems Engineer in Tokyo in a global IT company. I worked on both the client-facing and technical side. Through internal voluntary activities, I discovered my passion for working with people. For example, I helped organise internal diversity and inclusion workshops in addition to my daily job. Through that experience, I found that I enjoy dealing with people and want to help employees find a good experience.

However, it wasn’t easy to move into human resources (HR) with an IT background. To help with this, I decided to study for another degree. As I furthermore wanted to move closer to my home country, to Europe if possible, I found that Switzerland was the best option. So going through this decision-making process, I “found” ETH; the MAS MTEC programme was tailored to my needs. After twelve years of living in Japan, I packed up and moved to Switzerland with just two suitcases. Like any move to a new country, or in my case even a new continent, it was not easy at the beginning. Focusing on a career transition in a new country without any network was challenge. But nothing is impossible!

You currently work at UBS in Human Resources as Head of Talent Solutions. What does your job entail?

I first started in UBS Asset Management as a marketing project manager for the Japanese market, where my knowledge of Japan proved advantageous. I could push forward marketing projects, which were very interesting. When I started feeling comfortable, a colleague in HR, who at that time was my mentor, pointed out a vacant position in HR. As the job was what I had always wanted, I applied and luckily was offered the position. That was five years ago, when I was finally able to make the transition to HR. I suddenly became a total beginner at my job and had to learn everything from scratch. It was an intensive but great experience with a steep learning curve. Since then I have held three different roles in HR, all with lots of new learning and so far I have been really happy with the journey.

In my current role, together with my team, we are responsible for enhancing an internal career development tool at UBS, which helps employees explore different career paths and find new inspiration. They can navigate through different career paths to match their interests or search for the most popular roles or others, which appeal to them. It also matches vacant positions with the skills in their curriculum vitae. The latest addition to the tool, which I’m very proud of, is a rotation platform which allows employees to post or apply for a short-term rotation and experience working in a different part of the organisation.

To sum up, my job is about building technology that further enables employees’ career development and internal mobility.

You were a mentor in the MAS MTEC mentoring programme. What did you do?

I was a mentor when the programme was first introduced. When I was part of it, mentors and mentees were matched based on offers and needs. I became the mentor for three students. It was a great experience. I have always benefited from being a mentee on such programmes and have always gained many insights into my own career from talking to my mentors. I always appreciate having a third opinion, an external view. I therefore wanted to give back to MAS students and that’s why I signed up to become a mentor. I hope I was able to provide my mentees with insight or confirmation of their ideas.

Furthermore, you have been involved recently in a new MAS MTEC initiative: Can you tell us more about that?

The event was part of the MAS+ Talk series – a new student-alumni learning initiative that facilitates knowledge transfer between the MAS programme and alumni in industry. It took place in mid-May 2021. We were a group of speakers, MAS MTEC alumni from different years. We talked to MAS students and alumni about the career paths we had taken. There was also an expert from the ETH Careers Centre. She talked about career transition and highlighted very important points when going through the process. Overall, the feedback was very positive. I really hope that we were able to provide some new ideas to help participants with their transition plans.

Since you are an expert, what advice would you give students and young ETH alumni for their career decisions?

The most important thing is attitude: be open to everything. Try different things that you are interested in before deciding. There are many ways of doing that, such as signing up for projects or voluntary activities. This allows you to try out your interests. If you find something that makes you happy, talk to your network. And when the opportunity eventually arises and you are convinced that it’s worth taking the risk, step out of your comfort zone and seize it. Not to mention that it’s always good to have a back-up plan in case things don’t work out. Careers are not linear; you have to find your own path. Don’t be disappointed if you “fail” along the way.
Another piece of advice would be to leverage mentoring relationships. I personally am a big fan of them as I mentioned earlier. It doesn’t need to be through a specific programme. You can initiate it yourself by talking to different people. If you want to grow into a similar position to that held by someone you know, talk to them. Connecting to other alumni and growing your network definitely helps your professional career.