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Christina’s Life Story Part 3: My First Job
To help our readers know us better, we will be writing some posts about our backgrounds. This is Part 3 of 6 of Christina’s life story. For a complete story, please go to the “Our Story” tab on the homepage of our blog.
The job prospects for Computer Science graduates were indeed very good. Company recruiters came to the campus and most of my classmates had job offers even before they graduated. A number of them accepted job offers from government agencies in Singapore so I decided to start my job search in Singapore. My sister suggested that I apply to Arthur Andersen (AA) who was recruiting for Management Information Consultants (this division of AA eventually became a separate company now known as Accenture). I was hired as their first female consultant in the Singapore office but it did not bother me to work will all male co-workers as I was quite used to being the female minority. There were only 4 girls in a class of 36 when I was doing double maths in Taylors College.
AA was a fascinating company to work for. The company commits to spend 10% of its profits each year on training its consultants. Three weeks after I joined, I was sent to their training academy in St Charles, a small town just outside Chicago where the company HQ was situated. The training academy was very unique as it did not have a permanent teaching staff. All training courses were taught by consultants who work in the field themselves. Frequently, the “teachers” would be consultants who had completed the course themselves a year or two earlier and had gone to work on projects where they would have had a chance to put what they learned into practice. The teachers always had war stories to tell about challenges they faced in the field. It was a complete change from Universities where the lecturers are grey-haired academics with no real world experience. I regularly went to St Charles twice a year to attend and teach training courses.
In 1986, Asia was in recession and consulting work dried up in Malaysia and Singapore. Instead of retrenching us, the company decided to farm us out to other offices that needed people for their projects. This way, they could continue to pay our salaries and we could continue to develop our skills. I was sent to the company headquarters in Chicago to work on a couple of internal projects. One of the projects was to develop a “green book”, a term coined by consultants for the self-study training workbooks (which had green covers) that all consultants had to complete before attending a class in St Charles.
I really enjoyed working for AA. It was a fantastic work environment where I learned so much. We were constantly learning new things: from studying our green books, attending/teaching classes or working on client projects to gain hands-on experience. I worked on a variety of client projects in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and internal projects in the US. There was a very strong company culture (AA consultants were sometimes called Arthur Androids by people outside the company) which created very strong bonds among people who work there, bonds which remain even after we left the company. After six years, I had enough of living out of a suitcase and wanted to settle down so with very mixed feelings, I submitted my resignation in November 1988.
What I learned from working at AA was that effective learning comes from learning and doing and the best teachers are not the “gurus” with a lot of head knowledge but people who had gone out and done it, made mistakes and learned from them.
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