What does a Corporate Finance graduate do for a living?

I thought I would share some of my experiences with you, taking the view of a graduate from the Corporate Finance organisation of Novo Nordisk.

My first and current rotation spanning 1/9 2011 – 1/3 2012 is in Risk Office in headquarters in Bagsvaerd, Denmark. The Risk office’s primary responsibility is to support the organisation in fulfilment of their Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) roles. This includes implementing and maintaining a global ERM process covering all aspects of the value chain, supporting the business where necessary by facilitating workshops and training in regions and business areas. The Risk Office is the secretariat of the Risk Management Board (RMB), reporting to the CFO who chairs the RMB. For the RMB, Risk Office performs quarterly risk reporting which entails reviewing and challenging global risk reports submitted by all parts of the business. The 10 and 25 top risks for the entire company are selected and consolidated from the risk profiles and presented to the RMB and at a later stage the Board of Directors and the Audit Committee. A rotation in Risk Office especially provides an employee with project and stakeholder management experience and a full overview of Novo Nordisk’s business.

During my stay in Risk Office I have been involved in various different tasks, but for brevity, I have only listed the headlines below:

• Responsible for the Q3- and Q4 quarterly risk reporting of region China and other corporate business areas. This entailed challenging the submitted report and risks in direct dialogue with the risk coordinators.
• Assist in executing the annual Risk Network Days hosted by Risk Office where risk coordinators from the global risk network come to Denmark for three days packed with workshops and training, presentations, knowledge sharing etc.
• Running my own project focused on diving into a specific risk Novo Nordisk is currently facing in several markets across the globe. The project entailed analyzing the environment in more than 10 emerging countries through desk research and by interviewing numerous internal and external stakeholders. The project outcome was a report to be submitted to management along with the opportunity to present the results for the risk coordinators at the Risk Network Days.
• In charge of conducting a customer satisfaction survey reaching out to all relevant stakeholders.
• Contribute to the development of the Risk Office 2012 strategy, including identifying potential projects that would support the development and improvement of the current ERM setup.
• Investigating ways of improving the risk reporting and putting together presentations for senior management and other ad hoc assignments.

As a Corporate Finance graduate your main task is to serve as a full time employee in the department your currently rotating to. However, besides department tasks, there are various exciting projects and assignments related to the Corporate Finance graduate programme that you share together with the other 1. and 2. year finance graduates. Among other things this includes:

• Represent the Corporate Finance graduate programme by attending career fairs and participating in case competitions such as ”Innovation in Action” (see link). For example, I will be visiting the University of MIT in Boston, US, for the annual European career fair held in end January 2012.
• Plan, coordinate and execute student events such as graduate dinners, company visits and introductions etc.
• Seek ways to continuously improve the Corporate Finance graduate programme and thereby ensure that it is constantly tuned to offer the best possibilities to both current and future graduates.

Finally in the midst of all this, as Fredrik (see post here) wrote in his recent post, there are a wide range of interesting courses and trainings that you have to attend which will ensure that you continuously improve and learn new and more efficient ways of solving problems. Besides the ones Fredrik mentioned, Corporate Finance graduates have participated in a LEAN course and will be attending a presentation skills seminar and a full week of training at the Global Finance Academy which on an annual basis gathers Finance people from all over the world. The programme headlines in short are case- and project management training, presentations from different parts of the Corporate Finance organisation, factory visits and much much more.

I hope this gives you an overall idea of how the everyday life could look like for a Corporate Finance graduate. If you want to know more or have any questions whatsoever feel free to contact me. Happy New year to all of you!