Journey from Kolhapur to California
As soon as I received a message from our respected Dhamankar Sir requesting me to write my story on the contribution of CII-Forbes Marshall training, all old memories started rushing through my mind. India seems a far cry from California, where I am presently working on our new operations and business set up.
I must share an important anecdote with this message on how I got into the first Mechanical Engineering batch of CII-Forbes Marshall Steam Engineering Training Program of 2012. In preparation for our steam engineering training which commenced in June 2012, representatives from Forbes Marshall had come to our college in Karad in March 2012, for the campus placement. I must mention that Forbes Marshall was the first company to conduct campus interviews. Since I used to play an important part in different college committees and was leading many of them, my professors and peers had high hopes of me being selected. I scored reasonably well in exams too and was hopeful myself as well. Regrettably, it did not go as expected and I was not even amongst the four short-listed students.
This incident shook me to the core and exposed me to the real competitive world. Here I must mention that many times we get depressed from such incidents when there are huge expectations and we are not even close to meeting them. But I took this result as a challenge to improve myself and try my best on every opportunity that was going to reveal itself. I still remember the email I had sent to Dhamankar Sir and consulting him on various shortcomings I thought I had and how to overcome them. I had interacted with him many times before through the Training & Placement team or his periodic visits when he used to mentor students of our newly formed small-town college. I can admit now that I had made tons of grammatical construction errors even in that email. However, I did send the message across and that is what mattered!!
At that time, he informed us about the CII-Forbes Marshall training which was scheduled in June 2012. When I got an opportunity to participate in this training, I had promised to myself to make the best out of it. I worked on every aspect and gave more than 100% and it was this training program that provided me with this opportunity. For me, this training had provided me answers to all unknown fears and prepared me for the competitive corporate world. Before this we had only heard but never seen how an organisation operates, what is the meaning of production floor, corporate culture, business etiquette and the like. CII-Forbes Marshall training provided me with the requisite guidance. I must stress that this training course did not give me all the answers but did prepare and guide me to find my own answers.
I am very happy to mention that I topped the class in the first CII-Forbes Marshall steam engineering training and because of that I got an opportunity to work in international operations right after the training. A young boy who had visited Pune only once and not even seen Mumbai before 2012, has now been to many different countries like Sri Lanka, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Honduras, Thailand and is now based in California, USA. In just nine years I have been given many challenging assignments. In my very first assignment, I was the single point contact to all international branches for a newly launched product range of the company. After that I could also successfully explore the Latin American markets and worked on creating a distribution network and finally in the last four years, I could successfully build a sustainable business operation that too in an alien market in the USA. I am thankful to all my mentors, managers and the organisation for having trust and belief in me which have helped me in delivering results. Last but not the least, the robust CII-Forbes Marshall training has played a stellar role in preparing me to take up these challenges.
Life has changed in a way which I had never thought of and credit goes to the opportunity given to me by CII-Forbes Marshall training. It was indeed a “turning point” or I would rather say “Launching Pad” of my career and personal life.
Nilesh Patil
CII-Forbes Marshall.AA Batch-2
( FYI – He was from our Batch No.2, which is actually the first Mech batch that started in June 2012)
