Third world slumming for IBM fast trackers

27 Mar 2008 | 07:30 GMT

By Sylvie Barak

TO GET AHEAD in IBM, you apparently have to slum it in the third world teaching technology training programs for about a month first. IBM.’s citizenship group has created a new program it calls the “Corporate Service Corps”, which will send 100 IBM employees to form 12 teams that will then be deployed to various projects in Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana and Tanzania.

The program is being coordinated in conjunction with nonprofit groups and charitable organisations and IBM sees it as a way to test their potential high fliers for suitability in the company’s top ranks. It also, some night cynically suggest, provides rather a lot of exposure for IBM in markets that are either just emerging or at very early stages in their technological development.

According to the New York Times, a management professor at the Columbia Business School, Paul Ingram, thinks that IBM are making a very wise decision and he plans to copy it for his own students. He reckons that the move will be able to show which employees really are the top of the bunch saying that “the fact that you are an excellent programmer or salesman, or can lead a project in your own area and culture, doesn’t mean you can be a great leader outside of your technical or cultural expertise”. IBM says it wants to use the system to see how well their staff work with strangers, in foreign countries, and on projects they have little or no experience with.

But far from being repelled by the idea of being sent to a far away hellhole with no Starbucks, quite a fair few IBM staffers seem up for the challenge with about 5,500 employees fighting over the coveted posts. From that number, IBM says it will weed out all those who it does not see as being fast trackers, and then from those selected, the company will select only those with past experience in volunteerism. As if that wasn’t enough, they also have to write an essay and undergo gruelling personal interviews with top IBM execs in eight different regions of the globe. Expect a reality TV series coming soon.

The project will apparently start in July, but the lucky contestants, er, sorry, employees, will be able to study up and swap tips with each other in an online space modelled on an MMOG (think Second Life for brown-nosing corporate creeps).

IBM has also said that it plans to have had 600 of its staff go through the process by 2011. µ

L’Inq
New York Times

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