What I learnt during my virtual internship at Tata Steel -By Pankaj Goyal from FSM Delhi
The pandemic Covid-19 forced many B-School students like me to search out for a virtual summer internship program. As even the reputed organizations withdrew their offers, I was so tensed and worried about its effect on my career. However, my college friend then shared an advertisement regarding Prashikshan, for the virtual summer internship at TATA STEEL.
The internship provided options in various fields like Marketing, HR, Finance, and many more. As I have a keen interest in the field of finance, I shared this advertisement to one of my esteemed finance faculty and asked to help in the process. The faculty helped me to connect with one of the senior employees in the finance department of the company and the procedure for the hiring started.
The process of selection for an internship at Tata Steel consisted of a telephonic discussion/interview, where the questions ranged from my current education to technical finance knowledge. The questions were clearly stated to know if I have a clear goal or just groping in the dark for utilizing time. After all the processes and formalities, the interns were added to a WhatsApp group. We discussed topics on which we can work and build our projects.
A project entailing working capital analysis
Since due to Covid-19, the liquidity dried for some firms, it is an alarming situation for companies who work on credit. Hence, to analyze this trend, the group decided to take a project on working capital analysis with the current market scenario. The project required extensive and robust research on the steel industry to back up the analysis. It demanded to evaluate the loopholes in the industry and how the competitors of Tata Steel are performing.
Valuable learnings from the internship
The whole project gave me the insights of working capital and its effect on liquidity and business performance. It taught me the importance of an annual report and the methodology of reading a financial annual report. Sometimes, annual reports become difficult to understand, but with the guidance, I learned how we can easily identify the topic needed in the report. Finally, the ratio analysis helped in gaining knowledge of financial performance and how the nature of business affects the ratios, which is a drawback of analyzing the ratios as it doesn’t consider this provision and is just limited to calculating numbers.
It was a totally different experience and I enjoyed it. Being an introvert, it gave me an opportunity to help my fellow interns and discuss my issues with them. The virtual summer internship at TATA steel will definitely give a boost to my CV with a good brand name and deep knowledge.