Today Thiago and I had our first of 6 presentation days at one of our four clients. As I mentioned before it was the Software College and I was looking forward to the conversations with the students.
We arrived at 1 p.m. and started with a 90 minutes open question session with about 30 students. They had IT-, job- and education-related questions, but also such as “are women treated equally at IBM?”, “how do you handle people from other cultures, how to cope with embarrassing moments?”, “how can you do your job when you are in a very bad mood one day?” (??? I keep wondering myself…), “ why do western people not understand Chinese people who speak English?” (hahaha, very true), and similar stuff. They were kind of warming up, and then – hey, say hello to the embarrassing moment – asked me to sing a song in my language. Wow! I did not expect that! So I said, I would sing something, if they guy who asked me to would sing something for me first. The moment I said it, I wished I had not. OF COURSE HE SANG SOMETHING!!! So, I had to do what I said I would do. My brain was completely empty. Austrian song. Oh my goodness… so in the end I did not see any other chance than to sing the Austrian national hymn.. at least a little bit of it. That definitely made them laugh!
After this first session we moved to another room where about 150 students were waiting for us and I started with our presentation. After the first topic (which was about IBM Culture, Values and Competencies), I made a break for a question and answer session and as the extra microphone did not work most of the time, I moved around in the class and handed over mine to the person who was talking. If there ever was ice or at least suspense, the moving around was definitely breaking it.
After the break we went on with IBM job roles and career path. I started with a general overview and afterwards Thiago went into detail regarding more technical oriented job roles and skills needed. Then we had the last question and answer session. Luckily this time Thiago had to sing! :o)))
In the end we received very lovely charms and shortly after 5:30 we finished the session. It was more than four hours of presenting and talking and I have to admit, I was really exhausted afterwards.
When listening to our interpreter, I kept thinking that this was a very unusual or even unreal situation I was in. So many people listening to my presentation, a Chinese translator… Weird!
Tomorrow I will have to talk about efficient sales processes – this time it will not be students, but the sales and marketing department of the Job Center of Systop.
Stay tuned for more unusual stories…. (I will add pictures as soon as the crazy internet starts working again more consistently..)
- Sue
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