My internship at Wipro – Exploring the world of human resources
About the Author: Sumana Saha is a student of Xavier School of Human Resource Management, Xavier University, Bhubaneswar. She shares insightful details about her internship at Wipro.
Nervous jitters every now and then, excitement at its peak, calling up numerous friends and juniors, and taking a look at the checklist of onboarding documents a hundred times – this more or less describes the morning of my first day of internship. It all started when amid a sea of deadlines and assignments, companies started lining up at my B-school to hire summer interns. I applied for an internship at Wipro. After shortlisting the candidates based on their resume, they conducted a group discussion where candidates were divided into groups of 7 and had to discuss their views on trending topics such as ‘Is diversity essential in desk jobs?’, ‘Does the glass ceiling really exist for women?’, and ‘Is automation a threat to job security?’. I followed a simple strategy to get through the group discussion – I took a stand, defended my viewpoint with logic, and showed that I was open to handling multiple views while staying calm. This was followed by a personal interview which started with a basic introduction of my background and revolved around 2-3 main subjects. Since I didn’t have much previous experience, I focussed on explaining my personal interests and justified my inclination towards the organisation and the profile. The interviewers also put forth behavioural questions which gave them a sense of my personality. Some of the questions I was asked during the interview were –
1. What has been your greatest professional achievement?
2. Tell us about a sudden crisis you faced and how you dealt with it.
3. If a client is not satisfied with a particular project deliverable, how would you handle the situation?
4. If your team fails to reach consensus in a meeting, what would be your approach?
5. Tell us how you fought with your biggest fears.
After a scrutinising interview, I was hired as an HR intern as a part of WiSE (Wipro Summers’ Experience) to work on building future-ready managers. I was told that my responsibilities would be a mix of competency gap analysis and designing learning interventions for managers. These jargons confused me deeply and left me in awe; when I entered the office, I had absolutely no idea what that new world had in store for me.
Coming back to the first day at the office, my overwhelmed emotions were calmed by my mentor. He explained to me the project topic along with its scope and deliverables. He also helped me understand the organisational structure, context, and the significance of the project. I hardly understood anything that day but gradually, I started getting the hang of everything. There was another aspect to this journey which was settling in a completely new city. I hadn’t imagined that I’d be so quick in getting acquainted with Gurgaon but only after a few days, I found myself travelling all by myself and exploring new places in the city.
During my two-month stint at Wipro, I identified key competencies required by managers to be future-ready through primary and secondary research. I gathered inputs from our competitors about the existing frameworks in their systems and got in touch with external consultants to understand the new age developable managerial competencies. I analyzed various data and trends using SPSS tool and recommended a scalable and executable plan for developing competencies. I also suggested ways to retain millennial employees and recommended partnerships with a third party e-learning solution provider. Not having any corporate experience before, I had formed these bubbles about corporate, but Wipro, with its rich learning experience and super cool work culture, burst many such bubbles. I was so fascinated by the world of talent and appraisal that I spent a major chunk of my stint observing the employees. This period was an amazingly good deal of learning about the business world. People at Wipro were extremely approachable. They chatted with me for long hours and helped me understand how their services worked. The entire team seemed like-minded when it came to partying. I got to be a part of a lot of birthdays and farewell parties where I bonded with the team.
There was one event that was unexpected and surprising. Out of the 240 interns, I was one of the two people who were invited to share out internship experience with the RJ of Corporate Communications team. It was an overwhelming feeling to be a part of the interview that aired on Wipro On Air and flashed on all Wipro systems across the globe. At the end of my stint, I documented the research findings and presented them to the leadership team at Wipro.
Sumana’s internship at Wipro sounds exciting, doesn’t it? If you also want to be a part of an awesome internship program, check out these internships in Human Resources.
