Ms Dergunova graduated with honours from the cybernetics department of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics.
Ms Dergunova's career began at around the same time that the information technology industry in Russia started to take off. In 1994, Ms Dergunova got a job at Microsoft, where she worked for 10 years. In the position of CEO, then as President of Microsoft, Russia and CIS, Ms Dergunova was in charge of developing and implementing the corporation's long term strategic plans, intellectual property protection and development of IT education.
Since 2007, Ms Dergunova has been with VTB Bank. As member of the Management Board and Deputy President/Chair of the Management Board, she has at different times been responsible for:
handling major corporate accounts in market industries;
supervising VTB subsidiaries in the CIS, Europe, Asia and Africa;
information technologies and IT platforms, digital transformation and a comprehensive process automation programme.
From 2012 through 2016, Ms Dergunova worked in the government of Russia as Deputy Minister of Economic Development and as head of the Federal Agency for State Property Management. She oversaw the approval of a new concept for managing state property, the development of a system of key performance indicators for state governance, the creation of a single public state property management registry.
In June 2019, Ms Dergunova headed up the Graduate School of Management of Saint Petersburg State University while remaining on as President and Chairman of the Management Board at VTB. As head of the Graduate School of Management, Ms Dergunova's main job is to oversee the establishment of a modern business school, for which there is considerable demand both in Russia and abroad.