Relocating from Headquarters to a small affiliate – my first 6 months in Colombia as a Novo Nordisk Business Processes Graduate

Hola a todos de Bogotá!

Welcome to my first of a series of blog posts in which I set out to give an honest account of my personal experiences in the Novo Nordisk Global Business Processes graduate programme, with this first post focusing on my experience relocating to Colombia for my second rotation.

As a quick overview, the Global Business Processes graduate program is split into 3 rotations- each focusing on gaining exposure to a different functional area within the company, as well as gaining an understanding of a headquarters vs affiliate perspective, as the first and last rotation are at Headquarters in Copenhagen, while the second rotation is at one of our 79 international affiliates or 6 regional offices.  

My first rotation at Headquarters was in Research & Development, in a team called Strategic R&D, where I worked on a wide variety of projects and tasks. As a business student whose prior corporate experience had consisted solely of financial services, I joined Novo Nordisk with zero scientific or pharmaceutical background and therefore a first rotation in R&D was the perfect introduction to understanding the complex value chain of what is ultimately the core of our business – discovering and developing best-in-class medicines to improve the lives of our patients around the world.

Having already spent many years living abroad in various countries in Europe and Canada, as well as having had some exposure to Asian countries via university exchanges and extended backpacking trips, I thought that looking to Latin America for my second rotation would provide the greatest new learning opportunity and was therefore thrilled when the decision was made to send me to Colombia. Eager and excited to leave cold, damp and cloudy Copenhagen and start my South American adventure, I packed my bags with plenty of sunglasses and swimshorts, boarded my plane and after an exhausting 19.5 hour flight was greeted by ….. clouds, rain and moderate 15 degrees weather. Bienvenido a Bogota!

An uncharacteristically sunny day overlooking my neighborhood of Parque de la 93

First impressions of living and working in Bogota

Working in Colombia has proven to be a whole new experience for me on two fronts – one due to the different culture, and the other due to the difference of working in an affiliate rather than at headquarters. Work life at an affiliate is much faster paced and has a greater sense of urgency, as all our efforts and performance can directly be measured at the end of month in the form of our financial results. As opposed to my first rotation in R&D, I have now been completely thrown into the commercial part of the business and work both in the marketing team, as well as in the commercial effectiveness/business intelligence team. I am now already fully responsible for driving my own projects from planning to execution, which means that a lot of responsibility has been placed on my shoulders since day 1. This has of course been challenging, but has also been a great learning experience and has improved my decision-making and reaction skills greatly, as the decreased time between decision and execution requires swift and decisive action, as well as the ability to adapt and change course mid-pace.

Filming a video with the local obesity product manager and obesity medical advisor for a fun office-wide health initiative in the spirit of Novo Nordisk expanding into the obesity therapy area

Aside from my main projects, I spend the rest of my time trying to understand as much as I can about how an affiliate is run as well as trying to fully understand the three-fold setup of the Colombian healthcare system (which quite uniquely for a developing country covers 98% of the population). To supplement my understanding of the local healthcare system, I have also been shadowing our sales reps on their visits to physicians for 2 days a month starting halfway through my rotation, as prior to this I need to first focus on improving my level of Spanish.

Speaking of Spanish, this is the first time in my life that I find myself working in an office where English is not the main language. Although English is the official language in the office and all final versions of work are done in English, out of a total of 154 employees there are only 2 other non-native Spanish speakers (both of whom are Danish) and it is safe to say that the level of English varies quite a lot amongst the employees. Within my small team the level of English is exceptionally high and we have no problem communicating, however any meetings involving any employees outside my team are usually held in Spanish. The smaller meetings may start out in English as a courtesy to me, however as soon as there is a minor difficulty in explaining something or when people want to discuss an issue, the meeting switches to Spanish as the passionate Colombians launch into energetic debates that never return back to English. This has thus proven to be quite a challenge at times, however Novo Nordisk thankfully provides me with a Spanish teacher who visits me at the office twice a week, and I am working diligently to improve my language skills.

Tense moments in the kitchen during a suspenseful Colombia game in the 2018 Fifa World Cup

Salsa night, Chicharron and Skype calls - social life 9,000 Kilometers away from home

Being no stranger to moving to a new city, I am quite used to the process of having to start a new social circle from scratch, however I have often been aided in this process by being enrolled in university, which is a guaranteed way to instantly meet many new people and quickly build up a new social circle. Even moving to Copenhagen provided this in a way, as there were roughly 20 other graduates starting in their respective graduate programmes at the same time as me (mostly also foreign and new to Copenhagen), which again provided an instant social network. Moving to a smaller affiliate, I knew that I would not have this assistance and was a bit concerned about how my private life would fare during these 8 months, however any concerns I had were alleviated within the first week of my arrival, as making friends here has been remarkably easy. The Colombian people are exceptionally warm and open and I have instantly been invited to all sorts of activities by both colleagues, as well as other Colombians that I have met while out at various events. Colombians love to enjoy life and such there is not shortage of entertainment and fun activities to spend my free time on. The culinary scene in Bogota is exquisite and I have a variety of excellent restaurants to choose from, ranging from anything from sushi to traditional Colombian chicharron.  Furthermore, with a landscape that naturally gives itself to an abundance of extreme sports such as kitesurfing, motocross, mountain biking, mountaineering etc., all of which are extremely popular here, as well as countless clubs and bars filled to the brim any night of the week with Colombians dancing to reggaeton, salsa and countless other music genres, ensures that lack of sleep rather than boredom is my main concern here.  

The graduates in the other commercial graduate programmes are also currently all on their rotations abroad in cities as diverse as Tokyo and Sao Paulo and we all have regular catch-up session to share what projects we are working on, to give insight into our local market developments, as well as to share some funny stories and compare how different our local cultures and office environments are. I am very much looking forward to meeting them all again in a couple a couple of weeks, as half-way through the second rotation we have a “Graduate Mid-Term Meeting”, where all of us graduates currently abroad are flown to an affiliate in Europe for a week of development courses and learning about the local affiliate, current issues they are facing and various case studies of real-life situations that they have dealt with. This year we will be meeting in the Irish affiliate in Dublin and off us have already booked our flights and are incredibly excited to see each other again after such a long time apart!

It’s incredible to look back at my past 12 months at Novo Nordisk and reflect on how much I have already grown and learned about an industry that I previously had no knowledge about. It will be exciting to see where I will go for my third rotation back at headquarters starting in January 2019 – one thing is for sure, change is constant and it never gets boring or complacent in the Novo Nordisk graduate program!!

If you want to learn more about the Novo Nordisk Graduate Programmes, please check out our website: novonordisk.com/graduate

 View from the office