The CMA CGM Group is a world leader in transport and logistics committed to energy transition. CMA CGM is a family business group founded by Jacques Saadé. Today, Rodolphe Saadé, Chairman and CEO, is steering the Group into the future by opening new routes, forging links, and enabling business across oceans and borders for more than 40 years. It is one of the world’s leading container shipping and logistics group with 502 vessels calling at 420 ports in 160 countries, 750 warehouses and 110,000 dedicated employees working out of 755 offices worldwide.
The CMA CGM Group in India is a strong and intricate network of 27 offices spread across the nation, employing 4000+ employees. They offer a wide range of shipping solutions: six gateway ports and nine feeder ports within the country and provide intermodal solutions covering accessibility to and from more than 60+ inland locations. CMA CGM operates 14 direct weekly services calling in and out of India truly offering excellent global connectivity to Europe, U.S., Africa, South America, Australasia, Asia, and the Middle East Gulf. CMA CGM India is involved in the back-end operations for its group across the globe.
Three of our students from M.Sc. Applied Psychology (specialising in Organisational Behaviour), under the guidance of Dr. Kavita R. Shanmughan (Assistant Professor, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Heritage), who is a member of the Internship and Placement Cell, have been placed for an internship at CMA CGM, Chennai. The students have been assigned real-time projects wherein their contribution will not only benefit the organisation in the effective implementation of learning initiatives but also in boosting the morale and confidence of the students themselves in becoming professionals in the field of Industrial and Organisational Psychology. Due to the pandemic, the projects are being carried out in the virtual mode. The students will work closely with the Learning and Development professionals in the company who will be supporting them in the project execution.
The projects assigned to the students are:
1. Tanvi Dinesh Joshi will be a part of the Diversity and Inclusion project. She will focus on the current phase of diversity that the CMA CGM Indian operations are at, and on identifying the areas in which diversity can be brought in with strong empirical evidence and statistical analysis. The study will focus on women diversity. She will be required to guide and submit a research-based report stating the arenas that CMA CGM should focus on to bring in diversity, and how that must be implemented.
The key learning that Tanvi will get from this project is related to her learning techniques in analysing the problem and putting her conceptual and experiential knowledge about diversity into practice. She will be involved in the designing of the templates required for mapping the diversity and handling the key demographic inputs of 4000 employees.
2. Gopikrishna M. S. will be engaged in Internal Job Posting wherein she will be involved in screening the candidates. The objective of this project is the identification of the right candidate for promotion to the next level. She will begin as Supervisor, with the possibility of moving to the position of Team Leader.
The key learning for Gopikrishna from this project is understanding the recruitment and selection processes that take place within an organisation, understanding and analysing the supervisory job roles of varied departments, acquiring knowledge about the competency-based management used for selection, and also the theoretical and practical knowledge about assessment and development centres. Further, she will be engaged in designing assessment tools such as an aptitude test (revisiting the existing one) and creating other individual and group tools such as case study, role-play, group simulation, etc.
3. Madhumita Lakshminarayanan Rishinaradamangalam will engage in designing training modules and activities related to the training of the campus to corporate employees and for senior executives’ employees. The organisation wants to revisit the existing modules and look at them from new perspectives. Hence, Madhumita’s role will be key in terms of bringing fresh and new perspectives aligned with a new generation outlook.
The key learning that Madhumita will get from this project is the practical knowledge of creating the training contents and measuring the training effectiveness. In this process, she will also learn about the employees of CMA CGM and design the modules specific to the CMA CGM context. A few of the activities that will be designed for the training will require studying job descriptions across departments, intuitively thinking about the psychology of the freshers at work.