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View from the top: graduate engineering opportunities at Alcatel Lucent
Embarking on a Masters or PhD is a big investment of time and money so you want to be sure your employable at the end of it. QS Top Grad School spoke with Houston Spencer from Alcatel Lucent about graduate recruitment, top talent and leadership.
Name: Houston Spencer
Position: Vice President Business Strategy & Marketing
Company: Alcatel Lucent
Alcatel Lucent is an engineering oriented high-tech company that delivers communications and networking infrastructure, software and services. They employ over 75,000 people around the world.
QS: What key characteristics do you look for in your employees?
Well this very much depends on whether we are hiring into a managerial or technical track. We have a core set of business values that we look for across all of our employees, but the way our organization works is that people may enter through an engineering or business path, and so the characteristics that we look for quickly break down along those lines.
QS: How many graduates do you recruit annually across the world? Do you offer any graduate sponsorships or scholarships?
This fluctuates a lot. Alcatel-Lucent is constantly hiring to shift our skill mix into the highest-growth areas of our business. Traditionally our business has been in technology infrastructure – producing hardware for networks — however we have recently seen a very high level of growth in software applications, middleware platforms and services. For this reason we have focused on widening our skill set in the application and service sides of our business.
We have relationships with many of the large engineering universities and post-graduate programs around the world. We also sponsor undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD students undertaking research in areas that are linked to what we do.
QS: In which regions of the world does Alcatel Lucent recruit the most? Why? What kind of profile do you look for?
We find that our recruitment patterns closely follow economic growth patterns. In those countries or markets where per capita GDP is growing fast, spending on technology infrastructure grows quickly. As we produce and sell the technology that is used to build this infrastructure, then we grow and so our recruiting needs increase. In recent years, this pattern has followed the fast economic growth in places like China, Russia, central and eastern Europe, and some parts of South America, the Middle East and Africa.
Most of our recruitment activities happen on a national level. We have structured graduate engineering programs in place, and are perhaps a little less structured on the business side. On the business side we also have some international activity, such as our work with AIESEC.
QS: What are the key messages that Alcatel Lucent tries to communicate in order to attract top talent?
On the engineering side: technical excellence, we are an innovation powerhouse. We have more than 25,000 active patents, six Nobel Prizes, and even a Grammy. Alcatel-Lucent has a heritage of real breakthrough innovations such as the UNIX computer language that many now know as Linux, world records in optical data transmission, the DSL, and the core technology behind the mp3.
I look for people that focus on trying to grow other leaders. I think that is the foundation of ethical leadership: the desire to lead that comes from wanting to foster the best in others...
To business graduates our message is more about transforming the way the world communicates, and building a career around being a part of that.
QS: Are there any key challenges that Alcatel Lucent faces in attracting and retaining talent?
As graduates look to start their career, they are often attracted to brands that they recognize and know. Although they probably use our technology every day, they are not always aware of what Alcatel-Lucent does and the opportunities available to them. In that sense our challenge is getting the idea of what we represent and stand for into the minds of the people we would like to recruit.
QS: What would you say are the most important characteristics for responsible leadership and how do you encourage and foster leadership potential within Alcatel Lucent?
Alcatel Lucent has a clear framework of what we consider core leadership characteristics, but from a personal point of view, I look for people that focus on trying to grow other leaders. I think that is the foundation of ethical leadership: the desire to lead that comes from wanting to foster the best in others, and not from more ego-driven motivation.
We have many well-designed and robustly run leadership and professional development programs that identify high-potential individuals early on. Our STRECH program ensures that our future leaders have access to technical training, leadership development and personal development coaching. Through this investment we put the responsibility on the individual to fulfil the potential that has been identified.
