Shell India is just an ordinary company... In nutshell, Shell India is not the true representation of RDS!
Pros
RDS culture on Safety, Work-life Balance and Respect for Individual are very well imbibed in Shell India culture. Shell India is seen as a back-office center of the RDS in short term and on a long term basis, so it will be high people business than the material one. There would be so many low value and low skill jobs coming up in India along side few high end R&D work in projects team. Downstream especially Retail demonstrates the real Shell brand in India and the quality of leadership and culture it has produced, is quite different than rest of the businesses. Downstream is poised to grow, but other units like SBO-IT, SBO-Finance and BG assets are mostly run & maintain ones and are not going to see any substantial growth.
Cons
India leadership, be the Corporate or HR or Business Leaderships, mostly are seen as ones who remain far away from taking a strategic look to create a material business in the country and are mostly seen glued towards delivering their own targets as part of their annual plans. There is a very poor communication around the long term view on Shell India and a huge gap exists between what gets presented through embellished PPTs and what actually gets delivered on grounds. In a highly matrix-ed structure, leaders are often found busy pleasing their masters in RDS HQs based either at the Hague or London and demonstrate a toothless face to present a strong case for India for a better tomorrow in the HQ. In many aspects, global leaders virtually run India operations by advising or directing their Indian counterpart on 'way forward plans' and at times on ground Ops matters ... Since Shell India is mostly looked at as a 'Back-Office' option for Shell, dont expect a major growth for Shell in India which can give a fulfilling long term career option to high potential candidate. Recently there were many good leaders and high potential staff left the company and India leadership could not retain them, rather there were often seen as helpless and clueless about their long term Talent Management strategy. In Shell there are lots of parity issues as well such as Shell IT & SBO chennai finance ops have a very different kind of salary structure ( very low as compared to rest of Shell staff).. Pls consider this when deciding on your options as well.. And for engineering graduates who are looking at Shell to build their career as Reservoir Engineers/Process Engineers etc in Shell Technology Center Bangalore, pls do note that in this 'Lower for Ever' environments, 100s of engineers have been asked to leave the company recently. The new Shell center in Bangalore that houses such engineers is located 40Km away from the city in the northern most side of the city which is yet to very close to the airport. This center is magnificent, but sadly it may be scaling down operations in future because of Oil pressures.Therefore, any aspirants should consider all these points before making a call on their next career move.