Schools that participated in CMA’s 2010 Marketing Career Mentorship Program: Rotman School of Management; (MBA program), Centennial College, George Brown College, Queen’s School of Business and Telfer School of Management (University of Ottawa).
What it's like to work in...
Technology
A day in the life at Siemens Canada
By Karthik Raghavan & Ajay Thakur
Rotman School of Management
March 2009
Coming from an engineering background and trying to move into a business management role, especially a traditional business specialization such as marketing, makes it difficult to get the complete picture from MBA classes alone. It’s important to evaluate one’s skills and how they match with those needed in a marketing career - and there is no better way to do this than to observe the daily mechanics of a corporate communications department. With this intention, we signed-up for the CMA job shadow program, and visited Siemens Canada.
Our day at Siemens Canada was quite a remarkable experience. Dirk Miller, VP of Corporate Communications greeted us at the door and led us to the Edmonton conference room, which was to be our base for the remainder of the day. This was a particularly interesting day since a town hall was scheduled for the afternoon with Siemens AG Managing Board Member, Peter Solmssen, who was presenting company updates and answering questions. Dirk and his team were in charge of organizing the town hall meeting.
The day started off with an introduction to Siemens and its businesses. Dirk provided us with an overview of what his job entails on a day-to-day basis. As VP of Corporate Communications, he has to make sure that internal and external brand messages are communicated effectively to stakeholders, including the media.
We spent some time with the Director of Media Relations, who shared his personal experiences in dealing with different types of media and gave us a mini version of a training course that is normally given to the executives of Siemens to prepare them for interaction with the media.
After learning about media relations, we were invited to be a part of the town hall presentation in the main lobby for all employees at the company. It felt like we picked the right day to visit Siemens as Mr. Solmssen spoke in detail about current issues that Siemens is dealing with and the direction and values that the employees need to share.
The Q&A portion of the session was particularly interesting because there were a number of insightful questions about the business units that required considerations from both a geographical and purely B2B perspective. It was enlightening to understand that in a large global corporation the impact of a business decision in one geography can affect a seemingly disconnected business unit elsewhere in the world.
We had a tour of the new “Flex” workspace design that more efficiently uses the existing office work area, and then participated in a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) meeting with the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CCFF) where Siemens and CCFF were finalizing terms of support for a fund raising event. This was followed with a meeting and discussion on ‘Employer Branding’ and ‘Strategic Communication Planning’.
The day culminated with a wrap up and feedback session with the VP and his team. Over the course of the day we had pretty much bombarded the VP and his team with a number of questions and we were very moved by their patience in answering each and every one of them.
As a result of our visit, we gained some interesting insights about marketing communications that we were not yet aware of. We were expecting to see some heavy number crunching and BCG style analysis of market segments, but we were pleasantly surprised to learn that we would have the unique opportunity to spend time with the corporate communications department. This exposed us to a new facet of marketing, which deals with the media and in building brand image both internally and externally; concepts ranging from designing content on company web portals, employee training, spreading corporate philosophies and concepts, to managing the media and other external agency interfaces. These insights provided us with an understanding of how to align products and employees to a company’s vision. And we got a better understanding of an MBA grad’s role in a marketing organization and the skill sets required to be successful.
Did the day meet our objectives? We walked away from Siemens with a much better understanding of a corporate communications department and the role it plays in marketing a global brand. It was an absolutely amazing learning experience for us and we realize that short of being employed at a company like Siemens, it would have been hard for us to obtain such an up-close and personal learning experience. For that we thank the CMA for providing us the opportunity and above all we thank Dirk Miller and his team at Siemens Canada for helping us make the most of this opportunity.
