Mike is a Prism Associate with Henkel, a leading global manufacturing company that operates within home care, personal care, and adhesive product markets. The rotational program at Henkel gives Mike a first-hand look at all of the company’s processes and prepares him to be a future leader!
Transcript
>> My name is Michael Palmacala [phonetic]. I'm a Prism Associate at Henkel. It's a German chemical company. The role I have is it's a rotational program, 12 to 18 months I do rotations within the Rocky Hill North American headquarters for the company. I touch on everything from product development to marketing to engineering to customer service to field sales. When I'm done with the program it's geared towards either a sales track or a technical track. I, personally, am on the technical track. So come November I'll be joining the application engineering group. The one thing I knew is that I didn't want to be a process engineer. That's kind of the common role as a chemical engineer is you sit and work on the same process over and over again to try to improve it. The role with when Henkel brought of this Prism program, Roland told me about application engineering. An application engineer differs a little bit more from process in that you work with something new every day. You are a lot more customer facing. You have to make new parts work with older parts. And it's a different problem every day you have to solve. I feel like that would kind of break up the monotony of what the stereotypical chemical engineer does. So that was one thing that really appealed to me when I joined this program. Currently I'm in product management. So I am working under a couple of the product managers for the adhesives business. And as a general baseline they manage the product portfolio in North America. So they'll import new products. They'll rationalize old products. They'll just make sure that the business is running smoothing. The beauty of the rotational program is that your day is never the same. The basics of the day are you come in, you'll check your emails, you'll go through the monotony of that stuff. But then as soon as you go, then you have to meet up with whomever you're working with in the rotation you're in. So since I am in product management at the moment I'll meet up with the product managers that are running the projects that I'm on. One of the projects I'm on right now involves doing specifications for a large construction company. So I work with not only the product manager for those products but I'll be working directly with the construction company on the field so making phone calls, sending emails, things of that nature. But to be honest, there's no typical day. I can be working in the lab testing parts. I can be at my computer doing paperwork all day. Or I can be in meetings all day with the product managers. Sometimes I'll even be travelling out in the field and meeting with customers directly.
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