There’s a question every ambitious professional eventually asks: Is now the right time to invest in an Executive MBA? For the alumni of IESE Business School’s Global Executive MBA (GEMBA), the answer – looking back years later – is a resounding yes.

Hearing the testimonials of GEMBA alumni, we hear the stories of senior leaders, seasoned executives, and entrepreneurs who enrolled thinking they were signing up for a career upgrade. What they got was something even bigger: a transformation in how they see themselves and the world around them.

“My idea initially was to take a step forward in my company,” admits Fernanda Rodriguez, Class of 2003. “What happened to me is that I took a step forward in my life.”

It’s something the cohort has reiterated – people who came for the business tools and left with something harder to put on a resume: clarity, confidence, and a fundamentally different sense of what they’re capable of.

The GEMBA experience, by all accounts, is not a simple walk in the park. Alumni describe it as a “hurricane” – intense, disorienting, and challenging. The programme pushes participants to absorb frameworks and case studies, but also to examine their own assumptions. Students confront their blind spots and learn to trust their instincts under pressure.

“It’s much more about how you change yourself and the way you see things after the programme,” highlights Fernando Neves, Class of 2014.

Yet the intense work and personal growth taking place are balanced out by warmth and a spirit of camaraderie. Alumni speak of Sunday team sessions with a fondness usually reserved for family memories. These are the kind of bonds built when a group of high-achieving leaders has to set aside ego and simply figure things out together. Alumnus Kristian Pedersen, Class of 2008, memorably compares the GEMBA community to LEGO bricks: “We just click together.” The network, they discover, becomes a lifelong support system.

Even the timing of the broader world couldn’t shake the programme’s grounding force. Kristian Pedersen recalls the week Lehman Brothers collapsed – financial markets in freefall, global uncertainty at a peak – and describes IESE’s academic environment as “a rock.”

More than twenty years on, alumni are of course grateful for what the GEMBA did for their careers. But they may be even more grateful for what it helped them accomplish in their lives.

Watch the full video to hear their stories in their own words.