About Career Transition Thursdays
During the months of February and March 2019, the Office of Career Services is organizing ‘Career Discussions: Career Transition Thursdays’ every week. Speakers include senior leaders covering a broad spectrum of experiences, from McKinsey & Co., Dabur, DMI Finance, ESK Sonepar, GMR Group and others.
Industry leaders will speak about their career trajectories and share how they have faced transitions in their professional life. Though transitions are mostly seen as moving across sectors, functions or geographies, it could also mean moving across hierarchies, for instance from managerial to leadership roles. The purpose is two-fold. One is to help students understand how to deal with career transitions which are inherently stressful. The second is to help them bridge the gap between a job and a calling.
The First Session: Bridging the gap between human resources and other functions
For the first session, Pooja Malik, the Group Head for Human Resources at DMI Finance shared insights she has gleaned over 20 years of experience in the US Embassy, as an independent consultant and in her current leadership role at DMI Finance. Pooja designs and implements initiatives related to HR transformation strategies, talent performance, compensation, talent acquisition, talent development across functions and levels. A quick primer on DMI Finance: DMI Finance is a fast expanding organization. It was founded in 2008 by Shivashish Chatterjee, a 25-year veteran of international financial markets and Yuvraja Singh, former Managing Director of Citigroup in New York. Gurcharan Das, the former CEO of P&G India sits on its advisory board.
The Second Session: Bridging the gap between college and workplace
Seema Ahluwalia, Debanshu Dutta and Rhea Louis, a three-member team from ESK Sonepar visited the Jindal Global University campus for Career Transition Thursdays. Career Transition Thursdays is a series where industry leaders will speak about their career trajectories and share how they have faced transitions in their professional lives. Though transitions are mostly seen as moving across sectors, functions or geographies, it could also mean moving across hierarchies or from managerial to leadership roles. The ESK Sonepar team interacted with students, shared their experiences and helped students understand the differences between the college and the work environment, career and passion. Apart from this, an interesting role play helped students understand the art of cracking interviews.
The topic for the third CTT session was by Rambir Dalal. Rambir is Founder and CEO of Peoplescient. He has a professional experience of 24 years. Previously he served as Executive Director in KPMG India and as Regional Commissioner in the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation. Rambir spoke of how there is a generation shift every five years, and how one has to continuously adapt to it by reverse mentoring, learning from young people.
For the fourth session, Mr Rishi Lamba, Vice President and Cluster Head – Entire North Region for HDFC Bank was invited. Being in the banking industry for more than 17 years, he spoke about banking as being a profession where one has to be a sceptic in order to lead the organization profitably and ethically.
Aloke Goel, the Finance Head (Regional Operations) of Siemens Healthineers flew in from Mumbai to speak at the fifth session of Career Transition Thursdays. Mr. Goel had the nowadays-not-so-common experience of working in the same organization for 3 decades. His perspective was quite refreshing to the graduating students who are exposed to a world of instant success and gratification. Aloke believes that his career success was a result of his method of firstly earning trust of his managers, and then taking on greater challenges even if he was not so sure of the end results. What also inspired the students was how he spoke about his failure and how he took it in the stride and persisted through the tough times.
For the final session of Career Transition Thursdays, Mr. V. Krishnan, Executive- Director, Corporate Human Resources (India & SAARC), Dabur joined us. Dabur India Ltd. is one of India’s leading FMCG companies with revenues of over INR 7,680 crore and Market Capitalization of over INR 48,800 crore. Building on a legacy of quality and experience of over 133 years, Dabur is today India’s most trusted name and the world’s largest ayurvedic and natural healthcare company.
Mr. Krishnan started off by sharing why FMCG as a sector is bound to grow, and hence a great place to start a career. Consumption is expected to grow exponentially as a consequence of the growing population and net incomes. Distribution channels however are expected to change. Shifts are expected between the three main channels, Kiranas, big departmental stores and E-commerce. Over 80% of sales still happen through Kiranas and mom and pop stores in India. Digitizing and reforming manufacturing and supply chains is the path ahead for FMCG. Omnichannel i.e. a hybrid model approach is required in the digitized era. E-commerce is another area of exciting growth and opportunities.
He also shared that FMCG needs a certain kind of personality; it needs people who are comfortable being on the field. People who cannot get out of their comfort zones will find it difficult to survive in this sector. Mr. Krishnan also talked about the use of technology to hire and retain talent. One of the other challenges he shared is that of being relevant to a multi-generational workforce unlike startups that often have a workforce belonging to similar age groups.
