⚡ Skills transformation: what makes a career last – and keep evolving?
📅 Thursday, 5 November 2026, 18:45 – 22:00
✍️ Book your place
📍 Hotel Warwick, Geneva
Careers no longer follow a straight line. Industries are being redrawn, technology is rewriting job descriptions faster than we update our CVs, and the skills that got us here rarely carry us all the way. What keeps a career alive has less to do with the diploma on the wall than with the willingness to start learning again – and again.
This UNIGE Alumni EMBA Career event will bring together three women who have done exactly that. A podiatrist who became the CEO of a clinic group. A lawyer who now leads onboarding and due diligence for a global private bank. An IT engineer turned entrepreneurship coach and board member. Three sectors – healthcare, finance, entrepreneurship. Three generations of working life, from a career that began in the 1970s to one built over the past decade. And one thing in common: at every turning point, each of them chose to reinvent rather than repeat.
Those transformations were never only professional. Behind each pivot there was a moment of doubt, a decision to go back to studying, a network to rebuild, a professional identity to redefine. That’s the conversation we’d like to have with you on 5 November: not only which skills matter next, but what it actually takes – in curiosity, courage and stamina – to keep evolving.
Meet our speakers
Sandra Dunkel – CEO, Emeis Cliniques
Sandra started her career hands-on, as a podiatrist treating athletes and diabetic patients. Today she runs three private clinics in psychiatry and rehabilitation across French-speaking Switzerland, steering the strategy of some 400 people. In between: biomechanics at EPFL, market development at Medtronic, general management at Integra LifeSciences, and a federal diploma in healthcare institution management earned mid-career. Nothing about that path was accidental – she kept acquiring the skills each new chapter demanded.
Cynthia Soulikhan – Director, Head of Onboarding and Customer Due Diligence, HSBC
A lawyer by training, Cynthia has built a career of more than a decade in private banking, spanning regulatory expertise, business transformation and people leadership – a path she consolidated with an Executive MBA from the University of Geneva. She joins us to examine what actually makes a career last: why the competencies that launch you are rarely the ones that keep you relevant, and how self-awareness, continuous learning and adaptability become the assets that carry you through each transition.
Nadine Reichenthal – Business Coach
Nadine has reinvented herself more often than most of us change jobs: software engineer, corporate data manager, business development – then a full pivot into entrepreneurship. She founded accelerators at UNIL and UNIGE, teaches at HEC Lausanne, coaches startups from Bangladesh to Senegal, and built a programme that teaches 10-to-18-year-olds to think like entrepreneurs.
Open to UNIGE Executive MBA alumni, current students and their guests, this event will offer candid insights, practical perspectives from the field, and a chance to reconnect with the EMBA community.
Book your place here.
We hope to see you there.
Discover more about the Association UNIGE Alumni EMBA: https://alumniembaunige.org/
Your organising team :
Yousri El Antri, Marzena Lapka, Lone Le-Floch, Joelle Morlet, Alain Sigrist, Zheng Zhou
With the support of:
Geneva School of Economics and Management
