Interview with Shirine Khoury-Haq

Shirine’s career has been a transition from finance to consulting, and then to operations. She started in the US public sector before moving on to telecommunications, consumer products, retail and then insurance. She has led global teams delivering large scale technology and business change in FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 organisations, including several mergers and acquisitions. She has worked in the US, UK, across Europe and in Asia Pacific. She spent her childhood travelling around the world due to her father’s job and had lived on every continent except for Antarctica before the age of 12.

Early Life & Education

Shirine Khoury-Haq spent her early life moving around the globe for her father’s work in the oil business. She says: “Basically, we just travelled wherever the oil was and then, sometimes they just decided to move to another country as well.  So, what that meant for me, and then my sister who was born seven and a half years later, was that we went to lots of different school systems, often in the middle of the year.” The travelling gave Shirine experience of different cultures, the skills of assimilating into different school systems and exposure to different languages; alongside her native Turkish, she learned English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

 Shirine finished high school in Australia, then went to the Australian National University, where she gained a degree in accounting and economics.  With a move to the US, Shirine then took a qualification that allowed her to be a certified public accountant in the US.  She went on to gain an MBA at Ohio State University and in the UK was sponsored by IBM to take part in a leadership programme at Bristol Business School, the University of West of England.

 Shirine started working at the age of fourteen with a waitressing job in Pizza Hut, she continued to work through high school and university taking the opportunity to build up experience as well as fund her education and her start in life.