Management Career Pathway Interview: Neil Palmer
Neil Palmer
Operational Excellence Business Associate II, Ajinomoto Bio-Pharma Services
Management, 2017
One of the most frequently repeated pieces of advice that incoming college freshmen hear is to “join a student organization.”
For Neil Palmer, that advice helped him land his dream job after he graduated from the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University in 2017 with a degree in management. Palmer spoke with fellow Fowler alumnus Andy Esparza (’81, management) about how his experience with an SDSU student organization played a key role in determining his career path as part of the Management Career Pathway video series.
Palmer, who was an officer in the San Diego State chapter of the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), became interested in how to identify and resolve issues that lie within business processes while he was involved in the annual SHRM case competition during his senior year. During the competition, SDSU’s student team was given a business problem with the directive of presenting the most effective and cost-efficient resolution to two panels of judges.
After the experience with the SHRM case competition, Palmer realized how much he enjoyed it, and the challenge of resolving problems within business operations. He decided to turn this experience into a career after graduation when he submitted his resume to Ajinomoto Bio-Pharma Services’ San Diego location.
When the company called Palmer for an interview, his role in the case competition sparked the company’s interest in him as a candidate for a position in their business operations team. Palmer told Esparza about how interviewers “at every stage of the hiring process kept asking questions related to the case competition. It just showed how well that case competition aligned with what they were looking for at that time.”
The company offered Palmer the position and he started working at Ajinomoto Bio-Pharma Services shortly after earning his diploma from SDSU.
After being promoted to a level II associate, Palmer continues to find effective ways to resolve business challenges. “My main role is to identify and fix different issues within our organization,” Palmer told Esparza. “This can range from anything from a compliance issue, to a cost issue that has run too high, to finding a way to reduce the turnaround time.”
As he concluded his discussion with Esparza (who has also served as an alumni advisor to SHRM), Palmer said his best advice to undergraduates is to explore a field to “find where their passion lies, or at least most interests them.” He also advised them to “attend business organization meetings to find what they have to offer and see what certain fields look like” so that they could travel down that path toward a career.
For those students about to transition into a career, Palmer recommended turning to the SDSU Career Services Center which he called “an amazing resource: Helping with my cover letter, how to actually conduct yourself in an interview and everything else that gets you going toward those first steppingstones.”
