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What does an international commercial graduate do?

In less than 6 months into the job, Mei Lin, one of our international commercial graduates, actually drove an increase in consumption of alcohol-free brews at our Copenhagen headquarter of more than 6000%. Want to know how she did it?

One of the most frequent questions I am asked are: What does a commercial graduate at Carlsberg do? The short and commonly used answer is, it depends. It depends on which part of the organisation and which teams you rotate in. All our graduates will have and have had very different experiences, but what is common for all of us is that we get to learn. A graduate at Carlsberg is not a glorified Assistant, we are given real projects and real tasks that are meant to challenge us, to give us an opportunity to learn, and to expose us to different projects and functions in the organisation.

To give you a concrete example, I will share one of the projects I have worked on in my first rotation in the alcohol free brews (AFB) category team. When I first arrived, I was introduced to a relatively new and unknown category team that was and still is working on growing the alcohol free portfolio in our markets. As part of this I was asked to create an internal campaign and build a toolkit to raise awareness of AFB and drive trial. As the project manager I led brainstorming sessions, helped develop a creative concept, created campaign execution plans, worked with various stakeholders and agencies to create a campaign called Try January - A positive spin on the UK-based concept Dry January (an annual movement campaign launched in January to encourage people to abstain from drinking alcohol following the holiday period).

Try January ended up being a month-long campaign focusing on the positive attributes associated with drinking alcohol free. Examples of activities included rewarding our colleagues for taking the stairs instead of the elevator, tasting sessions with our wide range of alcohol free brews, and combining our daily lunch with an AFB. The result of the campaign was overwhelming, we managed to increase our consumption by more than 6000% and awareness and recognition of AFB increased significantly.

Throughout the project I received the right level of guidance, enabling me to bounce ideas off and sense check with my manager, while also challenging myself and learning by doing. Overall Try January was an incredibly rewarding experience from both a professional and personal perspective; it gave me organisational exposure and it was a great opportunity to “get my feet wet” with a practical execution project.

Carlsberg strongly believes in learning by doing, and as a graduate you get to do just that.