Summer Internship Experience At ITC Limited | Piyush Matto

After the rigorous interviews, I finally felt elevated to find that I had been selected for the Summer internship programme of ITC, KITES 2020 from my campus. Amidst the wavering tower of corona and uncertainty, ITC’s corporate communications team ensured all the interns of the fact that our internships would be starting from 8th April. I was selected for the foundational division of ITC, which is the Tobacco division. I was initially apprehensive about the nature of the internship given the situation due to COVID 19, but the Corporate Team from ITC handled all our doubts effortlessly and allowed us a smooth transition for the online work model. We had multiple sessions with various people working in different roles and across domains to help us understand how and what are the things we are expected to conjure from the 2 months at ITC. We had the liberty and were encouraged to reach out to people to fine-tune our doubts as much as possible. My project revolved around behaviour change and how behavioural economics could be used to bring about required changes in the work attitudes of the workmen. ITC’s participative management style and a focus on the most innovative trends of behavioural sciences shaped up the outline of my project. Organizational behaviour occupied a massive technical portion of my internship. I learnt a lot from my interactions with different members of the primary manufacturing and secondary manufacturing divisions of the plant-based on structured interviews and qualitative analysis. Perhaps the most exciting area of my work was the usage of Behavioural Economics elements like framing and loss aversion etc. and how it can be shaped into a tool to transform behaviour on the shop floor. Most importantly, every theory that we encounter had to be analysed and tied up with relevance and practicality of application in the desired context. I am grateful to my mentor who gave me the autonomy to experiment with a variety of ideas and most of my ideas and observations had to be validated by my mentor. Over the course of 2 months at ITC I came to realize that the company focuses a lot on research-oriented techniques with a well-balanced approach consisting of innovation and industry relevance. Even though my project had only a limited scope of labour laws yet they form an important element of any factory internship and therefore keeping them handy is always a good practice. I wholeheartedly thank ITC and my mentor for this wonderful opportunity and for their constant support and guidance.  

About the Author

Piyush Mattoo is currently a 2nd-year student at TISS HRM & LR Batch 2019-2021. Besides looking out for innovative practices in HR, Piyush likes spending time trekking treacherous mountains and writing poetry.

---