Capgemini E.L.I.T.E. || General Management || IT Consulting
Placements: For MBA students this is not a mere outcome of their degree, but the core of their existence; getting the best placement becomes the one and only aim of their lives for 2 years. Atleast for a majority of students. Working tirelessly day and night, balancing academics, placement preparations, extra-curricular activities and the inevitable party/networking culture of B-schools, anyone can easily get disillusioned. They might envision themselves in a role or focus fully on a company/career that might not be the best for them in long term. Within the MBA ecosystem, alluring factors like remuneration, projected career path or sometimes mere hype might lead a student to an unsuitable career path. Well, that, and sheer good/bad luck during the placement drives. Talking about my own experience, being an engineer and having worked in data analytics for 2 years, I aspired to work in my comfort zone of technology, but in a more impactful role, employee-friendly work culture and a company with diverse operations. Being a summer intern at Capgemini’s E.L.I.T.E. program made me realize that it was a correct fit for me because of these reasons and multiple other reasons (org-related), enlisted below with corresponding events of my internship. The internship started in the beginning of April as most others, but we already had an introductory call with our fellow interns, the leadership team and a means to reach the full-time E.L.I.T.E. employees 2 weeks prior to that. Our first week of internship was planned immaculately, strewn with leadership talks, skill-based sessions and workshops (design thinking as well as technologies like cloud and AI) and introduction to all functions of Capgemini with a culmination party, corporate style. This program was started to groom the future leaders of Capgemini, so the induction week endowed us with all the basics required to get right into a leadership role. Starting of second week we started with projects, with their nature spanning across digital customer experience, open banking, organizational implementation of new age softwares, sector analysis and report generation, etc. In all we had 2 months of diverse work experiences, tailored to both test us as well as give us a flavor of work at E.L.I.T.E. The stakeholders of the program made sure we had enough guidance at every step of the way. Capgemini inherently has an employee-friendly culture. You get to work within you own creative space without being strangled with impossible deadlines and angry superiors, unlike in a lot of new age startups with “Flat hierarchy” or “Dynamic nature of work”, so to say. A few months after returning from the internship I received a confirmation from the Placement team that I had been offered a Pre-placement Offer. Apart from the obvious security of a PPO, I was truly glad to be going back to the familiar space of E.L.I.T.E. where I could get diverse projects and add to my skillset as a leader and consultant with exposure to open ended problems, working with the top leadership. An E.L.I.T.E. employee’s first year has a 4-stint structure, which begins by the induction in Paris. Courtesy COVID-19, this year the prospects of overseas stints are uncertain. What we, E.L.I.T.E. employees-to-be look forward to in the first year at E.L.I.T.E. is working across diverse domains, working with the leadership team and understanding more about the different functions of the consistently successful MNC.
