María del Carmen Valencia

At 19, while in university, she started working for retailer Cifra, which was acquired by Wal-Mart (WMT) in 1997. She's now 39 and is vice-president for systems at Wal-Mart de México.

I am the first person on my father's side of the family to graduate from college. I originally wanted to develop software for robotics in the auto industry, but I needed to earn money during college, so I started doing programming on the side. And then I was hired [at Cifra] when the company was just starting to use computers. Now I'm in charge of everything having to do with technological strategy for Wal-Mart here in Mexico. I am in charge of a 300-person team. We [also] have a team developing the systems for Wal-Mart's first-ever commercial bank, which will start up soon in Mexico.

The good thing about working for a multinational is that you meet people from other cultures and you learn about other ways of working. If you're smart, you copy all of the good practices and you apply them and then you rise more rapidly. It has been difficult sometimes working for the Americans, because they would want to implement a new communications technology when we didn't even have fiber optics in Mexico. The fact that our country was a bit behind made it harder for us to deliver the same results they could, so we have to push our suppliers to make them move more quickly. I was the first person in Mexico to have a BlackBerry, because I kept pushing Telcel [the wireless company] until they gave us one and we helped them with testing.

Since we were the first country where Wal-Mart ventured overseas, and Cifra was the market leader in Mexico and already had advanced computer systems, they didn't replace our system with theirs. We worked collaboratively with them and they ended up trusting us. Wal-Mart's technology was very centralized, and if they were going to continue expanding to other countries, they risked running into a bottleneck every time they changed each new country's system. So we started doing more of the work in Mexico. In 2000 we exported our treasury system to Brazil, and then other countries wanted our systems. In 2003, I became a vice-president of Wal-Mart de México. We [also] have a team that is almost done developing all of the systems for Wal-Mart's first-ever commercial bank, which will start up soon in Mexico. We did everything from scratch.

I tell my older son, who is 14, that there will be a lot of competition in the workplace in the future, just as there is now, but well-educated people will always find a good job. Already, there are multinational companies in Mexico that are hiring South American executives to replace Mexican executives because they are just as educated but earn less. So, Mexicans have to compete not only with Mexicans but anyone they may run into.