Last Saturday, i.e. 20th February 2009, my friends and I visited the Deloitte campus to participate in an event conducted by Junior Achievement India in association with Deloitte. We had a wonderful time there.
Junior Achievement India is a member of JA Worldwide. JA Worldwide is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about business, economics and entrepreneurship through experiential, hands-on programs. JA works along-side business ventures to bring the real world to students and to bridge the gap between education and business.
JA India was established in 2007 and has its mark on several cities in India like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, etc. Know more about JA India at - http://www.jaindia.org/
Deloitte (also branded as Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) is one of the largest professional services organizations in the world and one of the Big Four Auditors. Deloitte mainly delivers audit, tax, consulting and financial advisory services through its member firms. Know more about Deloitte at - http://www.deloitte.com/
JA India in association with Deloitte invited our college to a business simulation competition - "JA Titan". There were four teams which represented Osmania University at the event. I was a part of one of these teams. My team members were Roopak, Sunil and Harish.
The competition date was announced as 20th February 2010. We were supposed to have an exam that day and were disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to attend it. But as luck favored us, the exam was postponed due to a bandh and we decided to go to Deloitte.
Deloitte had a huge campus and was really appealing. Initially, all the participants were put through regular security protocols and given identification cards. Then we all were escorted to the cafeteria for a light breakfast. The event started with an introduction to Deloitte, JA and community involvement of Deloitte by the CFO of Deloitte, Hyderabad.
There were basically two things that we did that day - attended a workshop by JA on "Careers with a purpose" and participated in "The JA Titan competition".
The workshop focused on the fact that there are a lot of jobs that are available but the students aren’t equipped with the right tools to be employed for the job. It also emphasized the point that most of the students rarely apply what they study at their colleges and generally tend to work in other domains. A noteworthy point of the presentation was the SEEK principle to estimate if an individual is capable of taking a particular job - Skills, Education, Experience, Knowledge.
Post lunch, the competition began. It was an online simulation competition. The crux of the competition was a sales goal where we were to sell a product in a market for 12 successive quarters with the other teams as business rivals in a virtual market. The consumer base was simulated by the program and the performance of the teams were measured with a performance index generated by the program itself. The game involved various market factors like Publicity, Research and Development, Cost Estimation, Price Decisions and many others. We gave a tough competition to the other teams but narrowly missed out in the end. Well, that’s business - you win some, you lose some. ;)
The competition was very exciting and got our pulse going up every time the quarter closed and results were being declared. Play the game at - http://titan.ja.org/
On a whole, we had a great time and were able to learn a lot about business ventures and their management.
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