When 30,000 candidates applied for a coveted management training program at L'Oréal, the Fortune 500 cosmetics company, only 60 would be selected.
One of the 60 was David Hung Yang, a 2015 Penn State Harrisburg graduate with degrees in management and marketing.
"I believe that I earned the offer through active preparation," said Yang. "I spent months reading about all the brands and financial statistics of L'Oréal and went through all the ad campaigns for all of their brands that aired in the past five years."
Yang also went through hundreds of LinkedIn profiles of those working at L'Oréal and conducted information interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees as background.
"As an old saying goes, ‘Fortune favors the prepared mind,’ " said Yang.
Yang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, moving to China with his family at just a year old. He initially came to Penn State Harrisburg for Penn State's 2+2 program, with plans to transfer to the University Park campus after two years, but decided he liked Penn State Harrisburg and stayed.
"I like the smaller class size and more personalized projects, along with the approachable and friendly professors," he said.
He believes that his experience at Penn State Harrisburg helped a great deal in the career opportunity with L'Oréal, noting that the well-designed program at Penn State Harrisburg allowed him to try out many opportunities to discover his passion for marketing and management.
"I'd like to send a big thank you to the professors and staff," said Yang. "I have learned much from them through their passion for their field and I'm certain their teachings will help me more along my path as a professional marketer."
Yang's success is no surprise to Ray Gibney, associate professor of management in Penn State Harrisburg’s School of Business Administration. Yang was his student in multiple human resource and organization behavior courses. "David was a good student who was detail-oriented, attentive, conscientious, and has a strong work ethic," Gibney said. "In addition to being very personable, the most impressive characteristic of David was his commitment to his responsibilities and education."
Though L'Oréal’s corporate headquarters are in France, Yang is working in his homeland of China, based in Shanghai. He will be working with a product line being customized for the Asian market.
Yang started in March 2017 and will be part of the Management Trainee Program for Lancôme, a brand owned by L'Oréal. After the one-year training program, he will be promoted to a product manager in charge of marketing, including price points, naming, and ad campaigns for a product line in the Greater China Region.
The program is made up of four personalized rotations, with specific roles determined as he moves through the program. Most recently, he has done product marketing for the make-up team, with responsibilities for planning and executing a product launch for a new line of liquid lipsticks. Yang’s next step will be to work at cosmetic counters in eight major cities across China to gain firsthand experience working with customers and discovering what they are looking for in the products.
"Five years from now, my career goal is to make my product line the most successful cosmetics product in China in terms of sales," said Yang. "My long term goal is to climb the corporate ladder and become a brand owner, with billions of customers. It would be a marketer's dream."