In an effort to strengthen its campus connect with students from reputed management institutes, PepsiCo India introduced a unique program called ‘The PepsiCo Apprentice’. This one-of-its-kind effort is designed to provide deserving students an opportunity to shadow leaders from PepsiCo India.

The program saw participation by more than 5000 students from reputed management institutes in India that gave three students an enriching experience of shadowing members of PepsiCo’s top management for a day, including Vipul Prakash, Chief Marketing Officer, PepsiCo India, Samik Basu, Chief Human Resources Officer, PepsiCo India and Partho Chakrabarti, Chief Operating Officer, PepsiCo India Foods.

According to Mr. Samik Basu, Chief Human Resources Officer, PepsiCo India “This initiative will go a long way in creating a benchmark on leadership engagement.  For any employee, engagement starts before the signing of an offer letter, and we want to build trust, which engenders loyalty. It requires open communication, clearly-articulated goals and unambiguous expectations and “The PepsiCo Apprentice” is a program which will help us engage young minds and nurture future leaders.”

Commenting on the experience of shadowing PepsiCo India’s senior leaders, Parth M Joshi (one of the three winning participants) said, “I found the experience of shadowing a senior leader at PepsiCo highly enriching and inspiring. The very fact that nothing different was planned just because of the presence of the Apprentice made the shadowing experience as close to a real world corporate experience. Meeting all the stakeholders i.e. distributors, retailers, agencies and brand managers gave me lot of inputs on the strategy adopted by PepsiCo in food and beverages sector in India and across the world.”

The three finalists were chosen through a rigorous selection process, involving three stages, starting with a quiz on PepsiCo. All that participants had to do was download a unique mobile application on their mobile handsets. After the first round of screening, 10 per cent of the participants were drawn out from the Leaderboard and asked to create a storyboard on three pillars of PepsiCo India’s employer brand- ‘Possibilities at PepsiCo’ - Real World Leadership, Performance with Purpose, and Together We Win. 30 selected participants were then required to create a video on the basis of the storyboards they had submitted. Of these, 3 finalists got the unique opportunity to shadow PepsiCo’s top management for a day.