June 4, 2016
In 2005, Ashesi alumnus Godson Quaye ’09 got a call from Ashesi about his application status; coming from the relatively larger Presbyterian Boys High School, he had applied to Ashesi because of the emphasis on small class sizes and close interactions with classmates and faculty. But when he picked up the call that day, he had a pleasant surprise.
“The voice on the other line was that of Dr. Awuah,” he says. “For the President of the University to call me was incredible for me. When I came to Ashesi later on to pick up my acceptance documents, the Admissions Director knew me by name, and gave me a ride back home. It was a great conversation, and before I had already started at Ashesi, it felt like home.”
At Ashesi, Godson studied Business Administration, and even before graduation day, he landed a one-year internship with a telecommunications company in Ghana as a Reputation Research and Planning Officer. He had undertaken internships in banking, finance and communications in the past, and the research internship represented a new challenge for him to explore. By the internship’s completion, Godson had developed excitement for the telecom industry, and decided he wanted to stay in it.
After his one-year national service program in 2010, Godson saw an announcement from the Career Services Office at Ashesi about the Vodafone Graduate Training program, the first of its kind in telecoms at the time. Seeing an opportunity, he applied and was selected together with other Ashesi alumni to join the program.
“I didn’t regret it,” he says. “The program gave me the chance to work on various exciting projects at Vodafone, before moving on to my first full-time role as an analyst on the Customer Value Management team.”
After taking on that role, Godson was selected to work on an international assignment within Customer Experience and Marketing at Vodafone Qatar in Doha. After two and a half years in that role, he moved back to Ghana, where he has been playing a senior managerial role in customer value management and customer experience within the Vodafone Fixed Center of Excellence. In his new role, Godson is responsible for the activities of over 30 people who help streamline service design for new products, and also help improve retention and loyalty for several thousands of Vodafone customers.
“The whole idea of thinking beyond the norm, preparing thoroughly and coming at a problem with team spirit, is something that I learned a lot of at Ashesi,” Godson says. “In my New Product Development class for example, my project team had a lot of diverse people, and aligning to a common goal alone was a big task. We had to then manage deliverables to our professor, manage different stakeholders and clients we were building our product for, liaise with colleagues who helped us test the products, among other things. It was a project that was much bigger than the classroom, and it’s not so different from what I experience in my work now.”
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