Curricular Extracurriculars

Over the past year, we here at the ECLP Blog have tried to give you an idea of what life is like on program. We’ve talked about marketing at GE, being a commercial leader, our annual training conference, and a variety of other topics. We’ve told you about what some of the many ECLP committees have been doing recently, from the Improvements Committee’s efforts to help shape the next level of The Program to the Recruiting Steering Committee’s efforts to find and recruit the next generation of ECLPs. We’ve told you about affinity groups like Women in Commercial and how the move to three, 8 month rotations gives you more time to do all the things you want to do in your rotation (read: make a bigger impact).

Commercial Excellence & SWAT Projects

There’s another part of life on program that we haven’t yet spent much time on. Every ECLP gets the opportunity to participate in a few different kinds of “extracurricular” projects during their time on program: Commercial Excellence and SWAT projects. Both address highly topical and timely business needs. Both involve working outside the confines of your normal rotation (aka “your day job”), often with a cross functional or cross business team.

Commercial Excellence (CE) projects are (usually although not always) single-ECLP undertakings in the areas of Pricing, Segmentation or Sales Force Effectiveness. Those first two are exactly what they sound like, involving deep dives in pricing and segmentation issues facing your business. The third - Sales Force Effectiveness - looks at the go-to-market strategies behind our products and services and how those relate to the commercial staff.

SWAT projects can be on any number of topics, from the Global Economic Crisis to how we approach our innovation process. Usually composed of a team of ECLPs from across many or all GE businesses, SWAT projects usually show a larger scope paired with a shorter timeline (or as my consultant friends like to call it, “high burn”).

So what does that mean for you?

In addition to getting to dive deep into areas of the business or topics with which you might not otherwise be familiar, CE and SWAT projects are excellent opportunities to get executive exposure. Often sponsored by business leaders at the highest levels, ECLPs get a chance not only to work closely with those executives but also to present their findings and recommendations to other executives in the company.

Posted by Sam