Swetha C. Thomas

Formally responsible for the professional development and program planning of 20+ colleagues in the team, across 5 offices & 5 pathways. I wear multiple hats as a TL including

• Mentor – Act as a trusted advisor and confidant for colleagues via a mentorship program where we connect on a (bi)weekly basis to discuss their aspirations, development goals and challenges faced
• Coach – Work with new joiners on their onboarding journey, guiding them through various databases and tools, methods of research and developing their core toolkit
• Evaluator – Present an unbiased overview of the key achievements and learning progress of analysts to the review committee, after a thorough evaluation process
• Review committee member – Listen to the review cases of analysts, challenge hypothesis and offer guidance that is critical to the developmental feedback offered to team members along with exercise voting rights for critical decisions made
• Real Estate Champ – Work closely with the Middle East RE leadership in charting out the vision and plan for the CCN hub in this domain, and contribute to the hub scale up to support client and knowledge demand. Also work with RE enthusiasts across offices (including India) to discuss their interests in this topic and channel that into client opportunities
• Hub manager – Work closely with the director of the hub in planning the strategy of the team, aspirations and vision for the coming year(s) and execute the same via initiatives and programs. This includes hub scale up efforts via recruitment events & interviews, identifying and planning organized outreach to sponsors, setting up team connectivity events, etc.

Most of my client work includes research and analysis for public and private sector clients around tourism, infrastructure, real estate. Select critical themes of research include;

• Tracked the COVID-19 stimuli announced by countries on a regular basis. This was then packaged into ready to share reports & benchmarking analyses for Sr. leadership and clients
• Worked on a Visitor Experience Unit that cemented the growing importance & impact of CX on customers throughout their journey. The learnings were taken to 2 distinct industries in form of a ‘playbook for clients’
• Delivering mega-projects from ground 0 to implementation (including those anchored on a mega-asset such as hospital or airport) – detailed benchmarking and bespoke thinking across the value chain, creating reusable frameworks and deliverables that can be customized to each client
• Identifying the best-in-class destinations across key tourism pillars, including niche tourism segments like Wedding or Romantic tourism, Wellness or Medical tourism, etc.
• Delivered an ideation forum that helped refresh the tourism strategy for a client through interactive sessions with 50+ stakeholders from the industry via smaller breakout groups
• Curated a series of newsletter for a city client on top innovations across relevant themes including infrastructure, city design, sustainability, green financing, walkability, etc.
• Worked on a strategy piece to define national culture and values to shape resident attitude towards tourists

• Started my professional development at McKinsey & Company with the Asia Regional Research Team, a 20 member team that serves consultants across APAC and MEA
• As a part of the team I have interacted with consultants across the Middle East (Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, KSA, Bahrain, Egypt) and APAC (Japan, Australia, Singapore, India)
• I have been part of engagements across industries, especially the Public Sector, Banking, Retail and Travel industries, by supporting them with key research
• As I grew in role, I have been able to buddy and onboard new joiners along with contribute to team structure and strategy discussions with the senior leadership
• My client work entailed projects where I played the role of an Associate on couple of tourism strategy projects in GCC
• Was designated and promoted to tenured roles on a fast-track basis (i.e., early promotion)

• McKinsey & Company
• I played the role of an intern for 8 months in the team, based on successful performance during the internship I was offered a permanent role in the firm