FMCG and Cola brand PepsiCo does a campus connect through a competition, ‘The PepsiCo Apprentice’ which allows three winners to spend a day with Pepsi’s top management.
This could be arguably one of the shortest internship programme one could have. It lasted only for a day. But it shouldn’t matter, if you get to spend a day with the top management of a large Cola and FMCG company such as PepsiCo. For a B-School student, this opportunity could just be ‘The Day’.
PepsiCo has recently completed a B-School contest, ‘The PepsiCo Apprentice’. The three winners of the competition got to shadow – three senior executives of the company – CMO Vipul Prakash; CHRO Samik Basu, and COO Partho Chakrabarti.
These three students were selected from a list of 5,000 students from across colleges.
Samik Basu, chief human resources officer, PepsiCo India, says, “The key objective of the programme was to engage with young minds and nurture future leaders.”
“This initiative will go a long way in creating a benchmark on leadership engagement. For any employee, engagement starts before he/she signs an offer letter, and we want to build trust, which engenders loyalty,” adds Basu.
The company believes that it requires open communication, clearly-articulated goals and unambiguous expectations to meet this objective.
What’s interesting is that it was business as usual at the office when the winners spent the day with the top management.
One of the winners, Parth M Doshi, says, “The whole shadowing experience was as close to a real world corporate experience as it was like any normal day at work. There was nothing different that was planned.”
The ‘apprentice’ winners got to meet all the stakeholders of the business – distributors, retailers, agencies and brand managers. It was an enriching experience for these three B-school students as they received whole lot of insights on the strategies adopted by PepsiCo in the food and beverages sector in India and across the world.
The three finalists were chosen through a rigorous selection process, which involved three stages. It started with a quiz on PepsiCo through a mobile app. Following which 10 per cent of the participants were drawn out from the leaderboard and asked to create a storyboard on the three pillars of PepsiCo India’s employer brand- ‘Possibilities at PepsiCo’ – Real World Leadership, Performance with Purpose, and Together We Win.
From there, 30 participants were selected and asked to create a video on the basis of the storyboards they had submitted.
Of these, three finalists got the unique opportunity to shadow PepsiCo’s top management for a day.