Summer Internship Experience 2021 - HILTI Group - Saurav Jha, DMS IIT Dhanbad

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On joining the company as an intern, how has your onboarding experience been like?

My onboarding experience was very smooth. HILTI has been ranked as one of the best companies to work at amd rightly so, HRs and my manager made sure I am all comfortable and there are no unanswered questions. I received my Laptop with other items of joining kit which marked the beginning of my internship.

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How has your interaction with the team members and colleagues been like? How will you make sure to leave the best impression on your supervisors by the end of the internship?

My internship has been very open and informative till now. I have interacted directly with the Head of Marketing daily as well as the Head of Region from Singapore. My work allows me to interact mostly with our Partner Market associates and it is done through video calls, WhatsApp and interacting with people from different countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives is quite a new experience for a guy like me who spent most of his childhood in a small town.
By the end of the internship, I plan to draft a Thankyou note for all the people I have directly or indirectly worked with to show my gratitude.

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Tell us in brief, about the project you are currently working on and how is this project going to help the company? 

My project involves strategic marketing. I have to find out the reason of the underperformance of the company in the Partner Market and what we can do to boost it. Right now I am doing territory planning and then mapping and finally, deciding should we do segmentation of trades or not.
As my work is directly supervised by the Head of Marketing, I get to interact with him daily and come up with decision making plans with him as well.

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Are You The Best Summer Intern Of The Class Of 2022? Share Your Own Internship Experience.

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Give us an overview of how you prepared for your summer placement season.

I started with brushing up on my basics of statistics and then enrolling in an online advance excel course and both of these preparations came in handy at the time of interviews.
My interview involved questions on regression, covariance, correlation, and one round of excel demonstration skills where I had to solve an excel sheet in front of the interviewer by using formulas like Vlookup and Macros.
I would suggest everyone who aspires to a career in strategic marketing be aware of these tricks and tips thoroughly.

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Based on your internship experience till now, what are some necessary skill sets one must be prepared with before starting an internship? 

As I said previously, MBA grads should always be good with numbers and office tools like excel, or maybe SQL even and if in digital then AEM, Google Analytics, etc.
You might not be the master of them but at least you should be well versed with how they operate and why are they used.
Now, one more skill comes very handy in the internship, and also, while hunting for the internship, it is your soft skills, your ability to connect with people and strike a rapport with them. This skill might be underrated but it really goes a long way.

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What are some new skills that you have developed while working in the company?

When I started working in HILTI, I didn't have any experience in strategic marketing. I had experience in Sales only.
I have developed few skills till now, the first and foremost is storytelling through PPT. No one wants to view numbers only, what they want to see from the PPT is an insight that used to lack in my earlier PPTs.
The next thing I picked up was AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) as I was trained in this software which helps us in controlling digital marketing campaigns. This tool is pretty handy as you can see HILTI campaigns that are running across the globe in 120+ countries.
One more tool in which I got hands-on training is the Spryker Web Management software which helps us in controlling the front end of our website globally.

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What are some of the challenges that you have faced in your internship and how have you overcome them?

1. My Excel skills were not up to the mark before I started my internship, however, I was given enough time before the start to brush on basics and now due to the internal resources of the company, I am able to do data analysis on excel itself. From using VLookup to Rank to Macros, I have used them all now.
2. The gap between theoretical knowledge of marketing and actual strategic marketing is really big and I got to understand that in the first week itself. However, my mentor kept guiding me through weekly one on one meet and introduced me to different parts of strategic marketing.

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Tell us about a situation where you were complemented by your Manager for your work. 

I was working on Territory Planning for the Southeast Asia market and my manager is the Head of Marketing of the India region. So once I was done doing my data analysis, I had to present it to my Manager as well as our boss in Singapore and they both complemented me on my depth of research and approved it in one go.

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What have been your major learnings during the internship? 

1. Organise Data Properly: Anything that is being discussed should be recorded then and there as it saves time because 90% chances are there if you don't write it you forget it. Proper Documentation is the key to any good project.
2. No Shortcuts: The more shortcut you take in doing your work, the more painful it becomes for you at later stages. If you are presenting insights then take a step back, think of it from the other person perspective and then make sure you have the answers backed by data for their questions because in the shortcut method, we just assume and that's an invitation to blunder.
3. Interpersonal Skills: In this past few weeks, I have met people from different countries from Switzerland to Bangladesh to Dubai to Sri Lanka and working in a cross country team requires a lively interaction and if you are shy and not able to convey your ideas or thought to someone different from you then you cannot survive in this digital world of meetings.

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Tell us about your final presentation of the project to your manager in brief. What was the toughest question asked during the presentation and how did you answer it?

My final presentation was a bit different than regular internships as I got the chance to be called in a high stake meeting that involved the head of strategic planning of the whole south east asia region as well as the country's biggest investors who wanted to understand how the territory marketing plan would work out which I have done. My plan involved separating the country geographically with high concentration of clients and projects and as this is based on my analysis from secondary data sources, the question which was the toughest was what if I invest and then there's no profit from the region in question and to make sure that the analysis is apt, we took them through our calculations of HRP and that I made the decision of creating a region based on attaining even 10% of the calculated HRP which would cover our cost as well as get us in profit zone.

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Some advice that you would like to give to your juniors based on your internship experience.

1. Create a Roadmap: Before starting any project, create a roadmap which you can always refer to when things become confusing or you lose track of the stuff you were supposed to complete as mostly, projects become very intertwined.
2. Making realistic deadlines: The golden rule of corporate is, commit less, deliver more. Your deadline should include you learning the technology if you are working on it for the first time as well as have buffer time to review and do necessary changes in it.
3. Always ask twice: Now this is my rule, I always believe in asking twice to make sure the things on agenda are noted down right by me. You don't want to go ahead with work and then look back to find out that you are going in the wrong direction as it kills productivity as well as damages your credibility.

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What was one of the best moments according to you during your internship?

The best moment of my internship comes on Friday not because it's time for the weekend but due to the fact that it involves an hour session with my Manager who is Head of Marketing as well so at that 1 hour, he doesn't act like my boss, he acts like a mentor and trains me in the things I want to learn about and of course a bonding session where he and I can just discuss the aspects of life in general. That's learning or a memory that's bigger than any stipend or HR planned getaway weekend for me at least.

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