Mr. Tejas Nandra, Management Trainee, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd. walks us through his journey at ABFRL and tells us that how in just a short span of 2 months, the company has helped him gain a great deal of exposure. The 2017-19 batch alumnus of IMT Ghaziabad has a lot of knowledge and wisdom to impart upon his juniors, which he hoped will help them reach the zenith of success.When asked about his experience at ABFRL in the past 2 months, he shed light on the fact that the company really focuses on a smooth transition for their employees by spending the first couple of weeks on employee induction and helping them gain a holistic view of the company. To align with the culture of the company, the employees gain an understanding of the ins and outs of the company and what sort of roles lie ahead for them.After the induction process, there is a Management Trainee stint, in which the first one and a half months were spent in the ABFRL stores. Upon successful completion of the Management Trainee stint, Mr. Tejas was moved to the store operations stint where his primary responsibilities included catering to different stores, understanding backend operations, gaining an overall understanding of the whole business and increasing sales. The whole process was very interesting according to him as there were a lot of new things going around which helped in facilitating his experiential learning.He was also all praises about the culture at ABFRL. According to him, there are two types of work culture at ABFRL:
First is the work culture specific to the office. As per his observations, the regular office of ABFRL has an amazing work culture and good office hours. They prioritize keeping the customer happy and roll out good initiatives for the employees.
On the other hand, the work culture outside the office, for the sales team while challenging, helps the employees in pushing beyond their comfort zone to grow and evolve. As ABFRL has the policy of employees first, it takes care of its employees. In the case of any issues or problems, the company has always got its employees back.
“We gained a lot of exposure in a very short span of time”, highlighted Mr. Tejas as he talked about his observations at ABFRL. He and his fellow Management Trainees were familiarized with different divisions of the company. They were acquainted with a lot of senior employees who started out like them and talked about which trajectory/ career path they had taken. They also expanded on the different business models which were used in the Aditya Birla Group.? They were familiarized with the Vision and Mission of ABFRL and how they were working towards it.Mr. Tejas could not name a single favourite thing about his workplace as there were so many things which he deeply appreciated. Due to the fact that ABFRL is customer-driven, he found that every day at the company was a new episode, a new story. It was more about the clothes and more about the customer experience. He also got to understand the customer needs, as before joining ABFRL he did not even know about all the activities which used to happen around a store. It was necessary to be able to picturise the product while in the store, to drive up the sales and go home happy.Mr. Tejas was quick to guide the students of his alma mater, IMT Ghaziabad by listing down some of his golden rules. He said: “Put more hours into gaining experiential learning. Speak to your professors and learn from their experience in the industry. Request guidance and live projects from them as actual learning will come from something that is on the ground. People don’t normally focus on live projects, which are actually a very good source of learning.”“Connect with good people on LinkedIn. Be active and spend more time on LinkedIn, not on Facebook”, the parting words of Mr. Tejas Nandra were borne from personal experience and provided the budding managers with an important lesson in prioritizing and time management.