IBM

Why do people join IBM? One reason is to learn more and grow their careers. At IBM, careers are experiences – diverse, un-limited and far-reaching. This is the employer brand promise they make.

IBM Consulting is one half of the IBM enterprise and employs 140,000 people worldwide. They wanted to bring that promise to life for their professionals.

We suggested a global careers festival that chased the sun. Something that any IBM consultant could tune into. A festival that would give them practical tips as well as access to inspirational speakers.

We know that IBM Consultants are time poor. We know that their days are built around client work and requirements. Asking consultants to attend a festival at one point in time is never going to fly. We needed to create a festival that was accessible to all.

The festival needed to be presented in bite sized chunks and at times that were suitable for a consultant in Bangalore and New York.

We proposed a 24-hour virtual festival. This online festival integrated the Slack and Watson Media channels. But to give the festival a global feel and a sense of time and momentum, we kicked-off in Bangalore before visiting Tokyo, New York and London.

We identified speakers and session hosts who were drawn from within IBM Consulting’s talent pool. We crafted the briefs for speakers and the session scripts for our hosts. We worked with IBM to develop key themes that would help unlock the mindset they were looking for inside IBM – curiosity, harnessing adversity, loving the discomfort that comes with any career path, and the principles of marginal gains.

We worked with IBM Consulting’s senior HR team to agree the approach and agree briefs for each of the speakers.

We created the look and feel for Careers Fest 22 and delivered a festival toolkit so that the identity could be easily applied by partners like Watson Media.

We crafted the internal communication that would tease people to join the festival – including festival flyers, films and post-festival one-pager guides.