EMBAmbassador Series: Samira Scheerer

Samira Scheerer
Executive MBA in Innovation & Business Creation
Class of 2022

Samira Scheerer doesn’t aim for less than revolutionizing the job market. Her company envisions the connection between a new understanding of work in the young generation of graduates and the new demands of work in a globalized world. Find out about her unusual view on the labor market and her creation of a new solution for new problems.

Samira Scheerer knows that starting a career can be an extremely challenging and overwhelming undertaking for young talents. Established job platforms often prioritize job titles as the central criterion for job searches. However, the problem with this approach is that it assumes job seekers already know what they are looking for, which is often not the case. These platforms fail to consider the specific experiences of students and graduates, whether gained from university classes or extracurricular activities. As a result, relevant skills and qualifications that don’t neatly align with traditional job titles may be overlooked.

Previous to the start of her Executive MBA in Innovation & Business Creation in 2020, Samira Scheerer, was aware of the opportunity to improve the way young talents start their career as she herself was confronted with similar challenges as a young graduate. During her career as a consultant at renowned management consultancies, she worked for clients in the labor market, where she had often witnessed the lack of career orientation for academic talents.

One opportunity opened up during her Executive MBA journey, more specifically in the last module, that formed her previous experience into a spark and then a company – the so-called Impact Project. During this project module, students identify and validate a business idea in line with their purpose and own vision and design all aspects of the business model. Together with her fellow students, Scheerer dedicated herself to the idea of a job simulation platform. The goal: to make professions more tangible for young talents. The starting signal for a success story.

During the last semester of her Executive MBA, she quit her job in consulting and took part in the accelerator program of the day zero investor Antler in Berlin. There she met her co-founder Tobias Grabmeier, also a TUM alumnus, who brings extensive experience in Product, Development and Design. Both were united by the desire to support young talents with their first steps in starting their career. Together, they developed the vision of building an AI-powered career companion to guide young talent into the world of work, starting with the quiz-based job-matching – and finally founded the candidate-first platform Jobreel in February 2023.

While crediting her background as the inspirational problem-giver for Jobreel, Scheerer is absolutely certain: the Executive MBA had a decisive influence on the founding of her business. “It is simply formative to deal intensively with innovation and entrepreneurship for two years. In the various modules we learned everything – from idea validation to market launch to financing, scaling, and internationalization. This prepared me very well. A valuable setting. Especially if you plan to leave your comfort zone,” she states.

Beyond the academic knowledge she gained through the modules, Scheerer values the network she built and joined on the way greatly: “The networking opportunities during and after the Executive MBA have been the greatest asset for me.” she shares, “In addition, I received so much inspiration from the many points of contact with entrepreneurs and the entire TUM ecosystem. A defining moment here was the international module at UC Berkeley and visiting startups in the Bay Area. Here I felt confirmed that I had made the right decision to quit my job for building my own company.” That courage has paid off.

Like Samira Scheerer, take the first step into your groundbreaking journey and learn more about the Executive MBA in Innovation & Business Creation today.