Ken Yien holds a double degree - Bachelor of Business in Banking & Finance and Bachelor of Business in International Business, both awarded by University of South Australia, Australia. She also holds an MBA from Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, UK; a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (International) awarded by Lancaster University, UK and a PhD awarded by Sunway University. She has been teaching Finance, Banking and business-related subjects in undergraduate programs offered by tertiary institutions including those from the U.K., U.S.A., Australia and Malaysia for more than 15 years. She has been involved in a few research grants projects including internal grant (as principal investigator) and FRGS grant (as co-investigator) in recent years. Her research work has been presented in local and international conferences.

Prior to teaching, she had gained corporate experiences from the banking industry, specialising in Share Margin Financing (SMF), Employee Share Option Scheme (ESOS), coordination & testing of system conversion, and credit control & administration. Apart from financial consultancy, her banking experiences included operational support at SMF centre, risk management involving designated stocks and non-marginable stocks, restructuring of SMF accounts and monitoring of the recovery of SMF-NPLs in the aftermath of financial crisis. She was subsequently engaged in the preparation of consolidated SMF reports in compliance with bank reporting to the central bank, monitoring of SMF portfolios of nationwide bank branches and SMF centres in Singapore, based at the headquarter of an anchor bank.