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I take this opportunity to share my awesome fellowship experience with SAP India Solution Engineering (Presales) team as it might be helpful to other colleagues with their career journeys in SAP.

 

How it all started:

I was approached by my manager (I know, it’s rare ?)  if I would be interested in a fellowship opportunity with SAP India pre-sales team in areas of Intelligent Technologies AI/Machine Learning.        It was exciting to have a customer facing role and getting to know real-world business problems from a presales lens. During my consulting days, my involvement in customer projects was from the blueprint phase, followed by development and testing mainly emphasizing on the technical aspects so this was a unique opportunity to have a 360-degree view of a customer engagement lifecycle.

This opportunity would give me a new perspective to understand the customer requirement first hand, create memorable presentations, develop an understanding for business needs, showcase solution demos, manage customer engagements, etc. Thus, I applied for the fellowship, and after the selection process, finally got through and was offered 6 months of fellowship with the solution engineering team in Bangalore, starting from August 2018 to February 2019.

 

The Journey and My experience

During my first day, I was briefed about the expectations, tasks that I would be required to perform etc. I was also asked about my expectations from the fellowship. After an introduction with the team, was assigned a mentor, Shalini, who guided me through the Know How’s of the role, discussed about my knowledge, areas of interest and then started my journey. Shalini was approachable and helpful whenever needed. In fact, everyone I had interacted during my journey was approachable whenever needed. The best part was, I was able to work on tasks without affecting day-to-day work in my existing team.

It was a great learning experience, to quote few examples, the design thinking workshop at customer location where we discussed issues and challenges faced, understanding business problems from end users, coming up with a proposal was an exciting opportunity and a memorable experience. I was part of the Design Shop setup and customer tours, where I got the opportunity to showcase demos at multiple customer locations. It has been a different experience altogether, understanding how the solution is pitched to the customer, their business requirements, pain points etc. It brings in a fresh new perspective of looking at things, and I believe everyone must experience this. Being invited to SAP India FKOM, being a part of multiple events, building demos for Design Shop, presenting demos at Bangalore Leonardo centre, creating PoCs in Machine learning came as a unique skill addition to my existing profile.

 

Fruits of the Journey and Conclusion

The setup of my fellowship was mutually beneficial in all regards. I got exposure to the expertise of pre-sales activities. There were periodic cadence calls of alignment, each time I was asked the areas I would like to work on, or would need more exposure to, and by the end when I look back, I can say that I was given the opportunities and exposure I had asked for. Thanks to Rayan who ensured this ? and most importantly, without affecting my regular work. Of course, there were days when I had to prioritize my task or go an extra mile, but at the end of the day, it was worth.

Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my current manager Ravi Rao and receiving manager Rayan Saldanha for their support and encouragement throughout the journey that proved to be a massive success. This experience would definitely help blossom my career at SAP.

P.S. In case you would like to know more, feel free to inbox me.

Best of luck for your fellowship journey and hope your experience is terrific just like mine!
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