Finance Graduate Employee Story – Anders

What it’s like to work here

My journey as Finance Graduate at Nestlé has shown me how much focus there is on your personal development while going through the rotations in the Graduate Programme. There have never been any limitations as to how much responsibility I could take in any of the positions I had during the programme, and there has been an enormous amount of the trust from all managers and colleagues during the whole process. The environment is quite fast paced, but there is room for making mistakes which you only learn from, and this would not be possible without this level of trust. Another takeaway from having been a Finance Graduate in Nestlé Nordics is an understanding of how large international corporations are structured and how much corporation exists between the countless number of employees from all over the world. It was quite a surprise to me that I communicate in English most of the time. Nonetheless, it has been a very positive surprise and it has shown me how much it reduces potential cultural and communicational barriers between employees.

What it’s like to grow here

Being a Finance Graduate at Nestlé Nordics and working in the environment of the Nestlé community have been the perfect opportunity for me. When I graduated, I knew that I wanted to work within finance in a larger corporation, but I did not know more specifically what I dreamt of doing in the end. Then my journey started here, and I now know that I will never be stuck within one area. There is room to always evolve. I started in the Specialist Services team in my first rotation where I worked with hedging, a pension cost project, and other tasks that gave me an introduction to which part balance sheets play in a company’s financials. I then moved on to working with COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) controlling which gave me insights into how it is to be a controller and to dig into the biggest cost line in the Profit & Lost. After that, I got to work with Sales Controlling for our Nestlé Professional (B2B) category which involved cooperating with our commercial team who does the sales on behalf of the company. To do so, I needed to expand my knowledge of how the coffee market works and how many different channels there are to consider and how the sales in general is managed financially. At the end, I got offered a fixed position as a Business Planning and Reporting Specialist where I mainly do consolidations and reporting of our actuals for each closing. I would not have been ready and equipped for such a challenging and important position if it was not for the Graduate Programme and how great my Graduate Manager prepared my internal moves along with the managers of all the teams in Finance teams.

The impact you can have here

After this experience, I have gotten to know much more about the structure of the company, and I now know much better how important and impactful the large variety of teams are. Not one part of the big puzzle is without meaning. When being a Finance Graduate, you have the perk of being able to look into many different processes with fresh eyes, which are not affected by working within a narrow area of the business for a long time. This has benefitted me much by now, and I feel that it has enhanced my general perspective on finance and enabled me to use many of the learnings I obtained from all the rotations I have been through.