It's a small but connected world - Prudential Momentum assessment (Part 1)

It's a small world we are living in - I think we have established that. Yet, every time I keep getting surprised when this proves itself over and over again.

Today was my big Prudential day: I went through the whole assessment center procedure as a part of the Prudential Momentum Program. We were congratulated early on that only 1% of all the applications make it to the assessment center, so everything I am going to be talking about below pertains to the 8 candidates and 8 assessors who took part in the event. I'll write about how it went a bit later and when I have more time, but just for now - how incredible is that:

• the Momentum manager is my ex-Shell colleague who used to be the HR offshoring project manager and was my contact in the Hague in the times when I was the HR Services Lead for Russia;
• one of the assessors held a short-term position in the Tax department in Shell Downstream;
• another assessor worked for Unilever - a company, which plant I am visiting later this week;
• I got a chance to talk in Afrikaans to another assessor because she comes from my beloved Pretoria;
• one of the 8 candidates graduated from the MBA program in IE just four months ago;
• another candidate is Russian and worked at Salym, a Shell JV I used to work with;
• yet another candidate comes from Romania and speaks fluent Russian.

The morale of the story is clear: the world is getting so interconnected that you need to take care of your reputation irrespective of where you are going and what you are doing, as you never know whom you are going to meet just around the corner in a place you least expect the encounter!