Week 1 of Internship Experience

Week 1 of Internship Experience

In the unit 1 seminar we talked about the unit 1 discussion and how we all are going to have fears and anxiety. The Professor talked about how this will be a unique experience for us and how it’s a scary class but it will be good for us. He talked about how they are taking away the right to tell us what to read, what to do, what to writ and etc. We talked about how you’re going to need to be a leader, deal with the organization whether it’s a manager or employee. There are special skills that are needed. You have to have a positive mind set to succeed in this course. we talked about how we need to make sure we know how to work the organization. We are in control of the position we are given by our leadership. We talked about how we are graded on the practical side. We are graded on what we are doing on the academic side. It’s a learning experience for us to figure out how to connect practice to theory. We talked about how it’s easy to do 40 hours a week for our organization buts lose track of the academic side of the process. We have to learn what we want to learn and experience in this organization. We also talked about the different outcomes we are going to cover. We need to figure out how what we have learned so far affects us in the real world. We need to do field research if it’s not our position but have questions. We need to talk to leadership, management or etc. if we have questions. For our own privacy how do the organization manage our W-9 forums and etc. What do they do with those forums?  We need to understand what the difference is between a process and a business. A process is related to a system and procedure is related to a policy. At the end of the course we have to identify one business process and one business procedure. Explain each one, fix anything that needs to fixed. Its experimental learning because in the real world no one tells you how to fix something within your business, they not show how to do anything. You learn as you go on and grow from what you are doing. Everyone is going to have different learning experiences based upon their job title. You want to observe and experience things within the organization and be able to write about them. You need to evaluate how your organization is employing ethics.

Internship Reflection Essay

Reflection Essay

 Introduction

            This week assignment involves applying the experience of the internship in an academic setting. Using the observations of the first week there will be an evaluation of professional competencies and business process. The course outcomes that will be evaluated.. These will be described in detail and improvements will be suggested.

Control Processes

Week one in the internship has shown that General Public University consulting seems to not have very many business controls. Organizational control comes from the goals and strategic plans of the organization of the company. ("The Control Process - Boundless Open Textbook", 2015) During week one the observation of General Public Consulting was that there was not clear plan. The leaders lacked direction and did not do a very good job of taking control of new interns. There was a meeting that was intended to make things easier for interns however the meeting did not give the interns any direction whatsoever. The basic message was that managers would reach out to managers and give the interns more direction. After week one the conversation from the manger was no better and the manager did not even know what job description that was assigned. There has not been any direction as far as job description and midweek there was an email assigning a new job and a different manager. The new manager is not much better and has not reached out to give the new job description.

Part of organization control is to implement new interns into the company. There should be a process put into place to not only welcome them but to orientate them into the company. The company should have already had the interns assigned a position and managers should be prepared in order to make sure the new interns were well oriented. The interns should have a clear idea what the company mission is and the objectives that need to be met. Knowing what the mission is will help develop the goals of the company. The managers will then be able to figure out how each department can contribute to those goals. The managers should not just assign people to a task but to do a better description of the job assigned. The top level managers did a good job of delegating the jobs down, and the interns feel more comfortable, but the mid-level managers did not do a good job with following up with the interns making them understand what the goals and mission of the job.

Professional Competencies and Control Process

The first week of working there seemed to be processes or controls in place.  There was new interns who were still confused as to what their position were. People had gotten promoted and did not seem to have a grasp on their new position. Business process management is a systematic approach to making an organization workflow more effective (Margaret Rouse , 2015).   General Public consulting did not seem to have this in place. However, after a few days of new interns being frustrated and confused, the new leaders started to take charge of their now positions and get the new interns situated. The process that needs the most improvement would be the smooth transition of new interns into the program. There was and orientation meeting and even though this was a good idea many people left more confused than when they signed up. The meeting had most of the leadership present and many of the interns were there as well. The recruiters were also present too. The recruiters had told the new recruits that their questions would be answered and that the program would be explained. That did not exactly happen. To improve upon this Business Process Management there should some changes.  The process should be an orientation to the new interns. This should be more organized and instead of it being a question answer session it should be more about the mission of the company and what the goals are. The business model should be presented and the interns should have a better description of what the job positions are. The recruiters should set up interviews instead of just placing people into positions. Once the person is hired then the department manager should reach out to the interns and give them a good description of their jobs and follow up with them to make sure they understand. Overall I think General Public consulting is a new company and has come a long way in a short period.  Small improvements in the process will make this a much better experience for the new interns. By adapting new and improved processes will improve the efficiency to the interns getting to work and less time worrying about the course itself.

Conclusion

            In conclusion, the real world setting of General Public Consulting there were two core competencies. The first was to evaluate the control process. Once an evaluation was made, the second was to evaluate the BPM. Week one exposed several weaknesses in the processes. The first week also showed the by having a BPM that the processes could be improved. There were improvements that were suggested and improvements can be made.

    

References

The Control Process - Boundless Open Textbook. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2015, from https://www.boundless.com/management/concepts/the-control-process-0-7331/

What is business process management (BPM)? - Definition from WhatIs.com. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2015, from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/business-process-management

Consulting Company Internship Reflections

Introduction

            The purpose of this report is to provide a short background on my internship experience. I will first describe my current position and my duties. Then I will briefly report on my current role, the challenges that I face and how I address these challenges.

Current Position - Description

            Carmella currently holds the position of VP of Human Resources and Sales & Marketing. She came to have this position because the current VP of HR and S&M stated she read her Bio and thought she would be perfect to take over her position. This week the dedication was to training new interns in the role that they are going to be performing so, training is what she did in the program. Although experience may be the foundation of learning, it does not automatically or necessarily lead to that learning (Boud et al., 1993) Effective managed and integrated learning are vital for effectiveness and viability. Carmella received her training about what tasks she is to perform as a VP. Her role as VP of HR and S&M she is supposed to host meetings that include HR, VP and Directors and also the AHOD (all hands on deck) meetings.

Current Projects

Carmella’s current project is her role to deliver welcome packets to interns when an onboarding occurs along with and an invitation to week zero orientation. The onboarding process occurs every four weeks for the company. KapConsulting’s experimental learning program thrives on the ability to recruit interns to run the operational side of the business. They know that having effective interns is essential to the function of the internship. In this instance, the interns are what is considered to be human capital. Human capital is described as "having skilled and knowledgeable employees as valuable resources so that a business can outperform competitors." (Stewart & Brown, 2014, pg.11) Carmella would implement the final approval of placement from the onboarding list.  As the VP Carmella also has to oversee the Directors of HR and S&M. When someone sends an email, she is responsible for responding within a 24 hour period making decisions and fair judgment about issues or concerns.

Current Challenges

            There are some challenges to the role of VP of HR and S&M that she faced in the internship program. The challenges associated with the enculturating of students into a virtual internship has been previously documented. Carmella has observed that the interns seem not want to analyze and go outside of the box. The community of practice is a shared history of learning where individuals continually negotiate the meaning of what they are doing through interaction. (Wenger, 1998 pg. 86) The community of practice is lacking in the KapConsulting internship by some interns in the program. Another challenge that she discovered is that the internship did not provide any SOP (standard operating procedures) in place, so she thinks everyone is just winging it. One person promotes someone else, however; they are not receiving the proper training to be at full capacity in their new roles. Interns get little training and from there it is on the job experience and making a decision on what they want to do.

Challenge Solutions

Carmella’s solution to the current challenges that she is experiencing is to face them head on. She utilizes her analyzing skills to see how she can better the situation for the next person. As a person coming in new and being promoted she found many challenges that could have been avoided by having very simple protocol and procedures in the process. While performing her role she created a new department called Training and Development which is working to put together a training manual that everyone would have access.  

Observations

            According to Crowston (1997), one of the practical problems managers encounter is to seek and implement alternative procedures for performing a certain task; often, these alternatives would have to be more efficient and cheaper. As part of this course's outcomes, students have to analyze organizational processes and procedures in various business settings. For this reason the new training and documentation department was added to show processes for each role in the internship. The training manual would have everyone’s job description and instructions for what they are supposed to do in their role. Carmella believes this would be a vital tool for everyone in the internship because they would have documentation to reference once the former interns have left the program. Prof David Kolb’s theory is that effective learning must include the possession of these four different elements to assimilate and process information. (www.ehow.com) (retrieve Sept, 2015) Kolb’s theory also speculates that concrete experience is followed by reflection on a person’s basic experience. Active experimentation would be the role that you take in the internship that leads to being your concrete experience.

                        Another course outcome that may help in the successful accomplishment of this project is the ability to synthesize concepts and principles for ethical decision making. Adding an obligatory layer to ethical decision that of critical thinking which Ennis (1962) appropriately named as "the correct assessing of statements". In her role, she had to make decisions about intern’s issues, concerns, and suggestions. Overall, including these tools and characteristics in her current projects will help her identify the most efficient and viable way to ensure that professionalism is utilized and ensure that there are no emotional responses involved. Being in a leadership role can be very depending so when making the decision to be promoted you would want to examine if there is time in your schedule and the use of your analytical skills necessary to discern what information is to be relayed to subordinates.  

Conclusion

            This short management report presented Carmella’s current position and the status of her ongoing projects. Below is a time card with the hours devoted to the internship in week. Most of the course outcomes have been very helpful in the development of internship thus far. There are some outcomes that have been directly related to her role in the internship and turned out to be crucial: ethical analysis, as well as critical analysis of organizational processes and procedures. In all things that have been learned coming into the internship is that you gain a lot of insight and experience.  Carmella is thankful for the opportunity and experience she received because the program allows her to know that you can have growth from chaos. Through it all there has a blessing of skills of leadership.

  

References

Boud, D., Cohen, R., & Walker, D. (1993). Introduction: Understanding learning from experience. In D. Boud, R. Cohen & D. Walker (Eds.), Using experience for learning (pp. 1-17). Bristol, PA: Society for Research into Higher Education

Convergent Learning Style Vs. Divergent Learning Style | eHow.(n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.ehow.com/way_5635221_convergent-vs_-divergent-learning-style.html

Crowston, K. (1997). A coordination theory approach to organizational process design.    Organization Science, 8(2), 157-175.

Ennis, R. H. (1962). A concept of critical thinking. Harvard educational review.

Enhancing Learning by Integrating Theory and Practice. (n.d.). Retrieved on October 30, 2015 from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ899313.pdf

Stewart, G..L. and Brown, K.G. (2014). Human Resource Management, 3^rd Edition.          [VitalSource Bookshelf Online]. Retrieved from http://kaplan.vitalsource.com

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems Thinker, 9(5), 1-10.