International Women’s Day: Maike’s journey

For the final instalment of our International Women’s Day blogs, we’re placing the spotlight on our Financial Controller, Maike Stein’s journey, and how she swapped career paths and found her place in finance.

Maike’s story

Usually, you find that people who work in finance have known this will be their path for some time, but for me I feel like I might have gone about it a bit backwards. I started my career out in a car rental company as an Assistant Manager and found that I was enjoying some of the smaller financial jobs in our office and was quite good at them.

After about a year or so a job opened in the finance team and I started my journey from there, working my way up over about 10 years in the same company before moving on to broaden my scope in other businesses.

I really enjoyed the transition into this side of the business, and I quickly found I was getting promotions which really encouraged me. I eventually realised though, that if I wanted to stay in finance then I needed the right qualifications. Something that became clear to me was that you might not be considered for a role without these qualifications, even if you have industry experience.

In life and your career, it’s important to keep on learning, so even with my bachelor’s and master’s in business administration, I knew this was an important next step for me.

Some advice that I would give to people just starting out in any career, not just finance, is that sometimes the skills that you learn in university are much more useful a few years on and can be applied later in life rather than straight away. Eventually I found my job at Amber, and it’s been a very different experience to working anywhere else.

It’s clearly a business that follows through on what it says for its people, especially when it comes to company benefits. Something that working at Amber has taught me is flexibility at work is important, as well as creating a safe space to ask for help or speak up when you make mistakes.

Maike’s IWD tip

If I was to give advice, I would say don’t be put off if you are interested in giving a new job a try. You don’t know if you don’t try, so even if it’s a temporary job or an internship, always be willing to give something new a go.

It doesn’t matter about your gender, just go for it. You will likely learn a lot along the way.