From the Lecture Hall to Finance Project Management

Carina Hutter, Business Management Graduate

At Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, the education is very practice-oriented. The dedicated professors deserve special mention. I was able to gain a lot of knowledge from my specialization. Another thing that went over quite well in job applications: specializations were already available during the bachelor’s program.

Carina Hutter completed her bachelor’s degree in Business Management at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences. After graduating from HAK Zell am See, the Pinzgau native decided to studybusiness at the Villach campus. Even during her high school years, she had a tremendous enthusiasm for business administration, particularly in the areas ofaccounting and controlling.

She counts her internship at KPMG in Salzburg as her first professional highlight. Rarely before had she learned so much about various industries, processes, workflows, and business development as she did during this internship. But things were about to get even better: Her first dream job–as she saw it as a recent graduate–was a nearly two-year position at Puma in Salzburg. Hutter served as the liaison between Controlling and Sales. She supported the EEMEA Sales Manager with budget planning, prepared sales reports, was involved in the rollout of a group-wide reporting tool, and took responsibility for various status reports for Puma EEMEA’s subsidiaries.

The topics of her bachelor’s theses covered two different areas. “In my first bachelor’s thesis, I focused on startup financing. I’ve always been interested in starting a business–I’m still working on fulfilling that dream, or rather, it’s currently in the works!” For her second thesis, Hutter chose to examine cost accounting using a taxi company as a case study.

Since fall 2020, Hutter has been working as a Finance Project Manager for SPAR at the headquarters in Salzburg. Prior to that, she gained project management experience at Tauernkliniken GmbH in Zell am See. In that role, she was assigned a wide range of responsibilities: serving as a project team member on various management initiatives and leading a variety of small- to large-scale projects. “I use some of the tools we were taught during my studies in my work today.” Thanks to her mindset of “lifelong learning,” her previous project experience, and learning by doing, Hutter knows how to navigate her day-to-day work.