Vanessa Bugge

Never would I have imagined that within eight months of working at Deloitte I would have:

• Had the opportunity to travel overseas three times
• Engaged in global conference calls with both clients and Deloitte colleagues
• Project managed a team of four testing analysts.

But that is exactly what being a new analyst within Deloitte’s Human Capital (HC) Consulting team has meant for me!

In April of this year, I learned that I would be working on a long term engagement with a multinational pharmaceuticals company, and that the engagement was a global scale Human Resources Transformation (HRT). While initially that didn’t mean too much to someone who had just joined HC and never worked on an HRT project before, I quickly learnt that the project was mammoth.

The client was seeking to transform their entire HR function globally. They needed to reassess and redesign their HR processes and policies, build a user friendly HR portal for colleagues and managers to use to manage the employee lifecycle, and work with three shared services centres in different parts of the world to improve efficiency in how HR processes were executed.

My role? To be a linchpin between multiple teams involved in the testing phase of this transformation – process and policy, technology, data mining, service centre and testing teams.

My day to day tasks could change from writing scenarios to test HR processes and system requirements, reassessing the testing plan because the test system was unfinished on the other side of the world, taking conference calls early in the morning or late at night, firmly negotiating the issues found with the system and processes with the tech team or the service centre.

Whilst the project presented a number of challenges, these were far outweighed by the amazing learning opportunities and other exciting rewards it offered.

The talent within Deloitte comes to life in no better way than seeing it across different cultures. I worked with an incredible team consisting of Deloitte colleagues from the Australian, Chinese, Indian and Singaporean practices. The team was also led by some of our American colleagues in Chicago.

Especially as a new graduate, to have the learning experience of working as part of a global team managing cross-border client expectations and relationships, and being flexible to changes which were translated across different time-zones, languages and locations, was amazing. I will definitely take these lessons with me throughout my career!

I consider myself extremely fortunate, and truly believe that I could only have done this at Deloitte!