What it does: Provides consumer goods, electronic and manufacturing services across India, with premises in 281 towns and cities. It has over 7,200 employees.
Best known for: Being a joint venture between major conglomerate Tata Group and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation.
Financials: Revenue recently totalled over ₹16,000 crore, a significant increase on the previous year. Profit for the year after taxes amounted to over ₹1,300 crore.
The good: Good benefits and relaxed hours.
The not so good: Slow career and company growth.
Hiring grads with degrees in: software engineering; mechanical engineering; technology.
The company began with a partnership between Tata Group and Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation in 1984. The pair decided they wanted an international, youth-oriented reach, so began designing and manufacturing economical watches. From there it began importing international watches, which were previously unknown in India, to great success.
By 1995 it expanded to include a general jewellery brand in response to the lack of involvement in the sector. Once again, they focussed on being economical, appealing to the style and price preferences of rural and remote Indians. Only after becoming well-established in this regard did they branch into luxury items.
Titan then exploded to encompass fashion, eyewear, machine-building, automation solutions, electronics and tooling. It’s now not only a leading Indian jeweller but a diversified retailer and manufacturer. Going forward it wants to keep developing and acquiring fashion brands to maintain their appeal to all Indians.
General internships are available at Titan, but mechanical engineering graduates stand to gain more via the Graduate Engineer Trainee (GET) program. This entails a varied array of tasks, including assessing the quality of design output, designing new tools and evaluating existing ones, do heat treatment and provide general design support as and where applicable. Basically, it’s far more involved than a few coffee runs! It’s great exposure to both the retail sector and engineering as a whole.
If you’re in any other academic discipline however, other companies may have graduate programs tailored to your strengths. However, if you’ve studied something widely applicable to business, such as finance, accounting or management, Titan can still be worthwhile through the likes of an Executive Traineeship or standard junior position.
Unfortunately, Titan is slow in many respects. It grows slowly, makes decisions slowly and promotes slowly. Your time will be comfortable and colleagues will be supportive, but generally, tenure is more important to promotions than merit. This isn’t a startup; you’re one among thousands, so go elsewhere if you want to innovate and move quickly.
Getting into one the traineeships is usually a matter of applying through your university. They’re a big company, so you may have even seen them on your campus already. The easiest thing you can do is approach them with your resume and hope they get back to you.
Once they do, if you’re applying for the GET program, the next phase will likely consist of an aptitude test, which is just a general written test of logical reasoning, followed by a technical interview. This will test the basic physics and engineering principles you will have already learned at uni. At some point, you’ll also have to participate in a group discussion, the topic of which will be an engineering problem. If they like what you have to say and you did well in your tests, you’re in.
A Graduate Engineer Trainee can expect to start on roughly ₹5,04,000 per year.
Titan Company is regarded as highly family-friendly. The working environment is both friendly and relaxed. Employees are given a stipend for travel expenses and are paid on time. The work-life balance is a commonly-touted primary benefit, contributing to a welcoming culture overall.
Their goal is to ‘create elevating experiences’ through their impact on retail markets. They hope to use a ‘pioneering spirit’ to achieve this. They have six core values: