2026 UTS Chancellor’s Award for Excellence: Vanessa Hudson
UTS graduate and Qantas Group CEO Vanessa Hudson has built a career on saying yes: to opportunity, to uncertainty and to life both in and beyond the workplace.
Vanessa Hudson knows an opportunity when she sees one.
The CEO and Managing Director of the Qantas Group has built a career on saying yes, even to seemingly unlikely opportunities. Over nearly 30 years, it’s an approach that has ultimately led her into one of aviation’s top jobs.
“I took every opportunity that was given to me,” says Vanessa, who won the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence at the 2026 UTS Alumni Awards.
“I had three roles that were sideways moves and they gave me exposure to a lot of different disciplines. That diversity became an incredibly important part of the skillset I was developing. I was becoming a generalist rather than a specialist.”
In her three years as CEO, Vanessa has led Qantas through a challenging post-pandemic landscape, steering the company through a period of industry and financial disruption and into an underlying profit before-tax of more than $2 billion during the 2026 financial year.
Learning the leadership ropes
It’s a remarkable outcome for someone who never particularly aspired to become the CEO. Instead, Vanessa says, her focus at Qantas was always on how she could add value to the roles she was in.
And there were many. As a Bachelor of Business graduate from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Vanessa came to Qantas in 1994 armed with a diverse set of business skills.
“My UTS degree taught me to think about business from more than one perspective,” she says.
“It introduced me to all the fundamental business disciplines, from accounting and finance through to management, marketing and customer experience, which turned out to be really useful for the career I’ve gone on to pursue.”
She started out deploying those skills in Qantas’s finance team but was soon fielding offers from across the company.
For the next two decades, she moved from operations to logistics, customer service, marketing and offshore experience, building the remarkable depth of knowledge that has defined her time as CEO.
In 2018, Vanessa was appointed Group Chief Financial Officer. It was both a return to her roots and a big step in her career, as she was now overseeing Qantas’s finance, strategy, fleet and procurement functions.
“I hadn’t been in finance for 20 years, and I was really excited about the opportunity, but also a bit nervous,” she says.
“I’m so grateful I had that breadth of experience behind me when I stepped into the CFO role.”
She was also overseeing a huge team and learning what it meant to be a leader when the going gets tough as COVID almost entirely shut the Australian airline industry in early 2020.
“That was the time I felt my leadership was tested the most,” she says.
I learned a lot about trusting your team and how important that is because being in very senior roles, you can’t do it by yourself.
“It really ignited something inside me”
Those lessons have been instrumental to Vanessa’s leadership approach in the years since. She prides herself on creating a culture of belonging that welcomes every kind of person into her 30,000-strong team.
Among her many achievements to date, she’s helped overhaul the gender balance in the Qantas leadership team. Women now make up more than 40% of the company’s senior leaders, nearly 60% of the senior executive and more than 50% of the board.
In part, these inclusive leadership values are a reaction to Vanessa’s own career experiences, including being mentored by other women who helped her move forward at pivotal moments in her career.
She’s also been shaped by the less kind moments. But rather than letting them hold her back, she’s used them to fuel her success.
“The one mentor who would never have known that she really motivated me was my primary school principal, who made a really unpleasant comment to my mother about my capabilities,” Vanessa says.
"I think in anyone’s life there are those moments that can either give you momentum or sap your confidence and motivation. It really ignited something inside me, a drive and a fire to prove her wrong."
When it comes to mentoring her own team, Vanessa knows what type of leader she wants to be, and she’s determined to help people around her shine.
“I love the role that I’ve got and the leadership team that I’ve got around me and being able to make a difference in their lives,” she says.
“I want to support them to make the decisions and listen to how we can make their environment better.
Uplifting the team around you is what’s going to get the greatest value, rather than you being the smartest person in the room.
Getting the balance right
Despite leading one of Australia’s flagship companies, Vanessa still makes time for the world beyond the C-suite.
As a member of the UTS Vice Chancellor’s Industry Advisory Board, she helps guide the university’s research and teaching activities to align with industry needs. This reconnection with her alma mater is both a nod to her time at UTS and an opportunity to pay her experience forward to create better outcomes for others.
She’s also a dedicated mother, a loyal friend and a realist when it comes to modern work.
“If I went back in time, the only thing I would say to myself is, ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself’,” she says.
“Invest in your friendships from school and uni. Take the time to be with your kids. Don’t feel guilty that you’re at work when you’re not with your kids. Don’t feel guilty that you’re not at work when you are with your kids.”
Maybe that’s the secret to Vanessa Hudson’s success. Sometimes embracing opportunity means saying yes to life as much as it means saying yes to work. As it turns out, both roads are part of the same journey to success.
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