European Careers

Where your skills will fit =

If you join The Coca-Cola Company, you're going to be working with people who are top of the league at what they do. It may sound a little daunting, but if you're open to working with the best - and learning from them - every day, you'll quickly build up an extraordinary range of experiences to develop your profile.

We have opportunities in a wide range of areas including:

• Corporate Identity and Public Affairs (CIPAC)

  Communications play a vital role at The Coca-Cola Company, supporting sustainable business growth by influencing opinion among consumers and other stakeholders right across Europe. As the Europe Group's communications specialists, we convey the core messages about our brands and our programmes, both internally and externally.

  In practice this involves talking to government, consumers, employees, the industry and opinion formers about our company story. Day to day we get involved - amongst other things - in community projects, PET recycling schemes, the Live Positively campaign and communicating the benefits of our beverages.

• Customer and Commercial Leadership

  Customer Leaders help us get business results faster by promoting teamwork. Commercial leadership focuses on growing volume, share and profit by giving every market best-in-class commercial capability.

  Day to day this means working with bottlers and senior level customers across different geographies - and often travelling to meet them. We manage multi-country bids and tenders, and negotiations - dealing with customers like Carrefour, Tesco, Fedex, Shell, Compass, Ikea and ClubMed.

• Finance

  The Finance team enables the business to function efficiently and effectively, providing the financial understanding on which key decisions are based. By providing accurate analysis and revealing insights, we add value to core commercial processes - our own included.

  Day to day, this means we're involved in things like evaluating the economic viability of a product innovation, undertaking financial planning, forecasting a brand's financial results or analyzing sales performance by channel.

• Human Resources

  HR put in place the policies, practices and procedures that ensure we have the right people in the right places to implement our overall business strategy. Recruitment, succession planning, career mobility and development, as well as our working environment, our culture and compensation and benefits all fall within our remit.

  On any given day this might mean consulting with managers around the business about their recruitment needs, learning about critical gaps within the business and planning how to fill them. Practical change management features heavily too and sometimes this means facilitating workshops and forums. Project management takes up some of our time - seeing that HR projects are running to time and budget.

• Internships

  If you are a graduate or an undergraduate looking to experience real business at a multinational company, many Coca-Cola Europe operations offer Internships that allow you to see for yourself what The Coca-Cola Company is all about.

  Are you fluent in English and the language of your target country? Are you ready to learn and grow in an international, diverse environment and experience the dynamic 'Coca-Cola' 
business first hand? Then take a look at the internships that may be available at the moment.

  Being an intern means more than getting involved in the day-to-day running of the company, you'll get exposure to real projects and challenges in vibrant environments. And you'll work with the brightest and best in the industry.

• IT

  Right across Europe, IT provides the world-class systems and infrastructure that optimize our business processes, deliver the right information for decision-making, drive business innovation, and mitigate enterprise risks.

  Day to day, this means helping the digital marketing team bring their ideas to life, working with customers like Metro and Carrefour on data scanning systems and testing and deploying desktop and collaboration tools like Blackberry and Webex. We also work with our bottlers, developing systems for gathering volume and revenue data.

• Legal

  Our Legal team supports us by advising on foreign investment, employee contracts, trademarks, and more. They liaise with bottlers and work closely with Marketing and Media.
  
  Our expert counsel to the Company covers - among other things - new product development and launches, agreements and negotiations with customers.

  Day to day our legal people work with the marketing team, helping them stay creative - but within legal boundaries. They approve all the print on every label of every product and help to write the promotion marketing that runs alongside many of our campaigns. And crucially, spend time protecting our most valuable asset: our brands.

• Marketing

  Our marketing team works hard to increase our sales, market share and profit by understanding our customers, consumers and the competition. The team's knowledge and ideas help us build cohesive marketing strategies for our brands - creating maximum impact.

  In marketing, every day is different. In the morning we might be working with packaging designers or creating a viral marketing campaign with an advertising agency. The afternoon could see us working with the Operations team to activate a brand plan, or running an innovation workshop for people from all areas of the business.

  Whatever we do, we do it as a team, combining expertise across Europe to deliver consistent marketing campaigns which are put into practice locally.

   

• Operations

  Local operations teams put our marketing plans into practice in each of our business units. They gather valuable knowledge about the regions in which we work to make sure our brand plans are fit for purpose.

  The people in our operations teams build relationships with local bottling partners and customers. They also work on communications and media relations to ensure the company's commercial objectives are met.

  Each of these teams works with key people and groups across the company, combining their local knowledge with wider business intelligence. Their aim is to make centrally-coordinated plans work in the local market. In Europe we have a total of 12 Operations teams.

   

• Packaging and innovation

  Two teams work within packaging and retail equipment innovation, one focusing on the way our brands are packaged; the other on retail equipment like coolers and vendors. There are many ways we use our technical expertise to add value for our consumers, customers, partners and other stakeholders.

  Day to day our packaging team meets with suppliers to discuss new product packaging and work with design agencies, perhaps developing a Christmas campaign or discussing design concepts. Collaborating with joint venture partners like Illy or Nestlé also takes up some of their time too. Our equipment specialists focus a lot on reducing the carbon footprint of our vending and cooling technology. They work with equipment manufacturers all over the world and partners like Greenpeace - who we're working with to develop natural refrigeration technologies.

• Research & Innovation

  R&I uses sensory science, product development and consumer insights to create totally new beverages and to improve existing ones. We work with our other R&I centres around the world as well as suppliers, agencies and outside research institutes to create the best beverages in the world.

  An average day might involve tasting new products and providing input for further fine tuning, working with consumer panels to get their input into new product development, or working with suppliers to bring their ingredient experience into the development process.

• Scientific & Regulatory Affairs (incl. Nutrition)

  By identifying scientific and regulatory issues, prioritizing their importance and resolving any conflicts, SRA improves the scientific and regulatory environment in which The Coca-Cola Company operates. One of our important functions is to prevent any consumer concerns about the safety of our products. This includes everything from ingredients and packaging to the nutritional value of our products.

  At SRA, day to day this means we do things like assess the potential use of scientific findings for the development of new functional products and analyse draft and existing legislation to find out what impact they have or how we can use them to our advantage. We work with Marketing, Research & Innovation, and other functions to help develop new products, checking ingredients, products, packages, labels and claims for regulatory compliance.

  In Nutrition, this means helping different countries with nutrition issues, working with our Research & Development team on the nutritional aspects of product innovations. Some of our time is dedicated to developing nutrition specific communications, establishing research priorities and liaising with health professionals and dieticians.

• Strategic planning

  Our strategic planning team provides expertise and detailed knowledge to our operations teams. It might be key market information, data about consumer trends and purchasing habits, or even developments within a particular product category. Whatever the specifics of the information, it's always accurate, useful, and essential to sustainable business growth.

  Central to how we put ideas into practice, the team also helps plan and run big projects. They say knowledge is power, and at Coca-Cola the strategic planning team holds the key to a lot of that knowledge, helping us to determine which projects will provide the best return or offering evidence to support new ideas.

  The evidence goes beyond the short term too. This team helps to influence where the company goes by analysing and predicting future market trends - so we can keep building a successful business.

   

• Supply Chain

  We ensure that every link in the chain stretching from bottler to consumer is working together. We cover every aspect of supply from Procurement and Manufacturing (including Quality, Environment, Safety & Health), to Engineering and Logistics.

  Day to day, this means meeting with our bottlers, with third party suppliers to discuss new products, sourcing potential third party bottlers or perhaps negotiating a contract for work on a new product with a specialised bottler. It also involves working closely with marketing and other functions within the business, aligning their strategic plans with supply chain capabilities.

• Technical & Quality

  We not only guarantee the quality and safety of our products, we also develop new technologies, commercialize new products and handle quality issues when they do occur.

  Day to day this involves writing mixing instructions, setting quality goals, developing quality improvement programs, handling crisis situations, as well as analysing water quality and levels of CO2 and sweetener on a routine basis.