Heading to ‘the Most Organized City’ in India!
In a few days, I’ll be boarding a plane and traveling 29 hours to meet the 17 IBMers I’ve been prepping with for the last 3 months. We are from the United States, Brazil, Japan, Slovakia, Canada, Spain, Germany, China and Turkey and span multiple different fields at IBM, including Consulting, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Information Technology, Project Management, and Human Resources.
For the next month we’ll be working and living in northern India in the city of Chandigarh. It is known as the most organized city in India and recently made the New York Times list of their top 52 places to go in 2018.
Pretty cool, right?
The city was planned by the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier and its claim to fame is being one of India’s best experiments in urban planning and modern architecture in the 20th century. The city is also situated at the foothills of a mountain range of the outer Himalayas and from what I’ve seen through pictures, the area is stunning. I can’t wait to explore throughout our time there!
Chandigarh is also unique because it is the shared capital city of 2 states — Punjab (where we will be) and Haryana. Many of the state government offices are located there so it’ll likely be a busy place for many industries.
On the second day in country we’ll have a city tour of Chandigarh so stay tuned … I’ll be sure to take a lot of pictures, especially for my husband and his love of engineering and architecture!
On our third and fourth day, our team of 18 is scheduled to have a kick-off event with the 6 different NGOs, non-profits and government agencies we’ll be partnering with over the month. Our community partners will give presentations describing their organization and scope of work for our time there and we’ll be introducing ourselves as well as our motivations for doing the CSC program.
My sub-team will be working in the Education & Skills sector, partnering with the National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research (NITTTR). NITTTR was established by the government, specifically the Ministry of Human Resource Development to improve the quality of technical education in India. The organization would like us to help them with designing curriculum for teachers in the areas of Blockchain and IoT technologies.
We’re excited to bring a new, outside perspective, leveraging our skills in business and technology, and practices and methodologies like Design Thinking, that are deeply embedded in the way we work at IBM. We’re also eager to learn more about the problem NITTTR is trying to solve and how we can design an engagement that’ll have the greatest impact for the community.
The other exciting (and probably by-design!) thing about my assignment is the work ties in to my day job at IBM with the focus on #Skills. I look forward to bringing back my experiences to our team. Speaking of which, they gave me an amazing send off yesterday with notes of well wishes and advice that will keep me going during tough times of this assignment!
I truly appreciate all of my family, friends, and co-workers for reaching out before I embark on this journey of a lifetime. I can’t wait to share my adventure with you. With wheels up in 3 days … my next post will likely be from India!
