My traineeship at Technopak

I have not yet much written about my current work at Technopak Advisors where I am doing my traineeship. Lets do it, as I really like my workplace!
The first perception about the office in the beginning was impressive. I did not expect something like this from India which is considered relatively poor country. Now, as I see it in Gurgaon, many international companies have their offices here - Ericsson, Oracle, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Microsoft etc... There are also many call centres operating in Gurgaon providing the outsourcing for the U.S. comapnies.

DLF Cyber City, Technopak office is located in the Tower A

I am working in the Mindscape - strategic consumers insights division.



Within Mindscape there are three kind of directions:
- shopper insights (Environsell)
- trend insights (Future Forward)
- design & innovation insights (Magic Box)

Until now I have been involved into some work within shopper insights and most of the time I am busy with trend insights. Right now we are working on 2 Outlooks (quarterly reports by Technopak) - Indian Wedding Industry Outlook and Consumer Trends 2009 Outlook. Probably I should post a separate write-up about the Indian weddings. I have not participated in any wedding yet (although it is not difficult to be invited to the wedding, I guess I have recieved around 5 wedding invitations to my e-mail from my collegues at work but most of them took place quite far), but I already have gained quite a deep knowledge about Indian weddings. I am learning a lot... sometimes it seems this is the only thing I am doing - learning - and I am not delivering as much as I should for the company, but everything is new and first I need to understand this new environment and work role.

What I am not so much happy with is the Indian time management or rather the absence of any time management. I feel that I am not able to impart my frustration that I had in the beginning about the time management and order because I am already used to it. I should had written about this before as I dont have these negative feelings any more and sometimes it seems like I am becoming like one of them in terms of time managemet :)

"Walt you talk" - this has been my motto. In India you raraly see this phenomenon if ever at all. And yes, in some sense I might behave as indian a bit... but I know it will change once I get back to the Western culture.

The company has taken a good care of us (means trainees) while helping with the basic formalities as FRO (Foreign Registration Office), insurance, local bank accounts. Doing everything by ourselves would had been quite complicated.. although even the FRO registration with the help of one employee was not easy. We went there twice (as we were missing some documents) and even then it was not completed.. as still something was missing. This could be a long and funny story how it finally got done!

What I can say is that I am already starting to believe in the potential on Indian economy! There are huge resources and possiilities. The only problem is the education. The literacy rate of Indian population is about 61% (2001 census) which is 73% and 48% respectively by men and women.

Anyway, I believe in India and it is not out of question that one day some business plans will be considered with this country.

Technopak office

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This internship experience I am getting by AIESEC - the world`s largest student organization that provides international platform for young people to discover and develop their potential.

Visit:

www.aiesec.org
(AIESEC International)

www.aiesec.ee
(AIESEC Estonia)