Lauren Jankelowitz

Lauren Jankelowitz

Current title
Chief Executive Officer, Southern African HIV Clinicians Society

Course at Wits Business Schoolz
Management Advancement Programme, 2004
Master of Business Administration, 2007

A defining moment in my career
I was a really good social worker. I loved working in a community, doing long-term development work with individuals and groups. However, because I was a good social worker, I quickly became a manager of peers, then teams and projects, and ultimately organisations. 

A defining moment in my career was when at the first organisation I ran, while signing off a financial statement, I realised I did not understand the financial parts of my job. This resulted in me doing a series of business studies, all of which built on one another.

The Nexus programme at Gordon Institute of Business Science was quickly followed by the Management Advancement Programme (MAP) at Wits Business School, which provided basic, necessary skills for being a manager and running an organisation.

I converted my MAP to an MBA as I had developed a new appreciation for business management knowledge and skills. Doing an MBA provided the foundation for my work as a social worker.

The combination of these two disparate sets of skills has resulted in me being a well-rounded manager of non-profit organisations, able to address problems from both the social and the economic perspectives. This combination has also pushed me in the direction of social enterprise. 

I consider myself a social entrepreneur and am currently doing my PhD on social enterprise. This outcome, a consistent mix of my social worker self and my business management self, has been due largely to the confidence and skills obtained at WBS so many years ago.