My Internship Experience - Essay Example

Internship Summary INTRODUCTION This study intends to comprehensively summarize my work experience throughout the internship program. With the aim toclearly outline the major learning outcomes, the report also tends to develop a reflective statement and an evaluative interpretation regarding my roles within the organization. In order to develop significant validity and reliability of the report, I would also like to demonstrate a clear view of the different essential processes and learning activities that I went through during the internship program, which further helped in enriching my understanding of organizational processes and workplace challenges to a considerable extent. This report will also make an attempt to figure out the activities performed in the internship program and explore why and how my responsibilities were outlined under the influence of the organizational culture and practices. Finally, the report will focus on suggesting effective ways through which, the organizational culture and practices were different from or were similar to my academic concepts. COMPREHENSIVE SUMMARY OF MY INTERNSHIP EXPERIENCE In the internship program, I was assigned to work with a Food Staffing group, which is quite similar to globally celebrated organizations, like Aramark and Centerplate. The group basically deals with a range of innovative services to different segments of clients including universities, healthcare institutions, school districts and multitude business industries. I have also observed that tailored strategic directions regarding the food and beverage programs, exceptional range of hospitality designs along with different rewarding programs and retail operations, form the few key services provided by the organization to attract the customers and further strive to build a long-run relationship with them. In this regard, I have gained a wide knowledge and experience regarding the different operational functions and services of the organization in which, I was assigned to complete my internship course. During the first week of the internship program, I have gained an in-depth understanding about the operations performed by the white board. The white boards, within the operational location, is entitled to list out each employee on the basis of their place of operations in different locations within a particular market. As per my own understanding, listing locations of employees in different places on the operational white board plays an important role for the organization to gain a clear view of the about where, when and how long the employees are scheduled in each target location and therefore, have a better control on the allocation of job responsibilities as well as in employee management. According to my observation, the process of listing employee location on the white board further helps the operational function to make effective schedule of and enable the business function to address each potential client in diverse locations within a particular market segment. During my internship program with the group, I have also recognized that the white board were categorized in accordance with the detailed information about each client, which helps the group to easily locate and provide the demanded services to them. During my internship program with the Food Staffing group, I have observed MIT Boston University as one of the major clients of the Food Staffing group. The facility services of the group provides an extensive number of services in different academic, cultural and awards related events of MIT and ensures sufficing the ultimate desires of the clients. During the internship program, I have learnt that the service responsibilities of the Food Staffing group should highly comply with the environmental and cultural aspects of the organization. From my personal observation, I have clearly observed that the food staffing group is highly focused on the culture and working environment of the clients or organizations while providing its versatile range of dinning and hospitality services. The group also tends to align its operational activities in line with the cultural aspects of the client base and ensure to provide quality based food services to each client as per their demand, preference and convenience. I have also learnt during the first week of my internship that the white boards associated with the food staffing operations are also beneficial for the employees working within the group. The procedure helps employees to make contacts and gain appropriate and detail description about the locations, wherein the services are required to be provided. Besides ensuring better operational through the white boards, I have also gained adequate knowledge and understanding about the monthly ADP reports and their significance to empower the service delivery functions of the group to its major clients. The internship program with the food staffing group was also included in my internship roles and responsibilities to perform a detailed look up of the ADP Monthly Review regarding the hours of employment and their wages for each month. During the period of my internship with food staffing group, MIT, the leading client of the organization was also requested for an ADP report to track down the employment hours of the employees in each month of the year 2012. During this particular period, I have clearly observed that ADP’s monthly review provided detailed information about the amount of staffing hours that required to provide services to another organization. According to my own understanding, the process of reporting monthly review through ADP ensures to build a clear picture about the volume of staff working in a particular service providing company. During my internship with the food staffing group, I have also learnt that an organization can also acquire adequate information about other companies while developing ADP monthly report. According to the process of ADP report, the group has also entered into a valid contractual agreement with KSM Staffing in order to formulate appropriate and clearly justifiable statement of the volume of staff for MIT. According to my personal understanding, I also identified that an organization can have adequate assistance from the other companies while reporting monthly review of the staff members. The process helped the food staffing group to gain major insights while it was highly focused on developing monthly ADP report for MIT. It helped the group to access the actual volume of the staff members and ensure reporting their actual working hours in terms of serving food and beverage items in different events in MIT Boston. I have further recognized that the cooperative agreement with KSM Staffing had provided adequate support to the food staffing group in reporting a clear assessment of the number of staff along with working hours of each individual worker involved in serving food and beverages in different events within the university during the year 2012. In addition to my experience from the internship program, the permissive characteristics and nature of the management can also be considered as a major aspect of the food staffing group. The manager of the group has significant level of lenient traits that provides adequate support to each of the individual employees while performing various types of services. With regard to my personal experience, the manager provided adequate support to the staff members by allowing them a degree of independence even if it was regarding take breaks during the working hours that further helped to motivate each employee towards increasing their quality contribution in providing different types of hospitality services to the clients. With these types of management strategies and practices, I have gained a significant knowledge that offering such independence to the employees empowered their performance skills and helped them to achieve their desired performance goals more efficiently. Moreover, I could also imperially observed that the practice of providing needed breaks during the working hours also ensures increase in the productivity capability of the staff members and help them increase willingness with their assigned roles and responsibilities. In this context, I have observed that the management practices also imposes major influence on the performance of each individual employee and helps them remain motivated with their assigned job roles. EVALUATIVE INTERPRETATION OF MY ROLE IN THE ORGANISATION UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF ITS CULTURE AND PRACTICES Intern’s roles and responsibilities are majorly influenced by the organization as it not only helps to improve operational efficiency, but also provides extensive support to develop their decision making skills in different phases of the organization. With regard to my own understanding, a successful and effective internship program consists of numerous factors in direct linkage with organizational culture and practices that further helps in refurbishing the skills and competencies of interns as potential employees (Gates & Paul 18-21). Moreover, I do agree with the concept that an effective internship course often contributes major support to the organizations and the leaders to renovate their strategic measures and management practices that further helps to achieve a competitive position in any respective business industry (Gerken, Rienties, Giesbers & Könings, 7-22). In relation to my personal experience, the knowledge and experience that I have gained from the internship program can help me to build a strong set of operational and managing capabilities for the organization. Perhaps, it was owing to this reason that throughout my experience from the internship program, I have empirically determined that the organizational culture along with practices have major influence towards shaping the roles and responsibilities of the interns, including those entitled to me. From the perspective of my own experience, I was able to identify an effective process of strategy development towards improving the operational functions of the organization. The process of formulating effective allocation of staff members that I have observed during the internship program can be a major potential for me to improve my staffing and controlling skills in an organization, which can also be identified as a major influence of organizational culture and practices on my roles and responsibilities as an intern. The process of maintaining adequate information about the workforce, especially their individual roles and responsibilities further helped me to capture a large number of potential customers in a particular market wherein such an accordance ensured my enhanced performance. Moreover, my internship process, being linked with organizational culture and practices also enabled me to gain a learning that its helps obtaining a strong control for the management towards measuring the performance of each individual staff member based on their assigned roles and responsibilities (Bukaliya, 118-133). WAYS IN WHICH THESE PRACTICES DIFFER FROM OR ARE SIMILAR TO BROADER CONCEPTS EXPLORED IN THE CLASSROOM From a critical understanding, the practices as mentioned above, were quite different from the broader understanding developed in my classroom sessions. For instance, performance management and managing people within an organization seems to be much complex and multifaceted than I had presumed going though only the broader concepts in my classroom. For instance, the implementation of ADP Monthly Review process in the food staffing group adds to the distinction between my internship experience and academic knowledge. Although I had read about the assessment processes applied to manage the performances of the employees and its importance in the contemporary business management practices, I had no idea about the ADP monthly review process, which tends to provide adequate support in assessing the actual volume of the working staff along with the amount of their total operational hours (Haq 56-57). Although this depicts a distinction overall, this learning also reflects a rudimental linkage or similarity between my classroom learning and internship experience. Undoubtedly, this particular understanding enhanced my competency to develop and reform the organizational process in accordance with the interests of the potential major stakeholder groups in the organization and build a strong and sustainable position of the business. The strategy of assessing the total volume of the workforce and evaluating their amount of working hours would also help me to develop a clear representation regarding the productive skills and performances of the entire workforce. In relation to the recent competitive scenario, the practice would enable the organization to gain significant insight to achieve competitive advantages by managing its internal strengths more efficiently. Correspondingly, it can be stated that while the classroom study delivered me with a board understanding of organizational operations, the internship program assisted me in gaining comprehensive knowledge regarding the rudimental techniques followed by organizations in their real life functioning. CONCLUSION From an overall understanding to the internship program, I have been able to gain significant knowledge regarding the importance of workforce motivation. Apparently, the internship program with a food staffing group has provided a number of benefits in improving my operational and decisional skills. Throughout my overall internship program, I have been able to gain insightful knowledge and understanding regarding different managerial and operational fields that can improve my capability to build a strong workforce within an organization. The decision making process and managing skills that I have observed during my internship program could also significantly help me to increase my managerial capabilities and improve the performance of a particular organization where I shall be employed after the completion of my internship. Works Cited Bukaliya, Richard. “The Potential Benefits and Challenges of Internship Programmes in an ODL Institution: A Case for the Zimbabwe Open University”. International Journal on New Trends in Education and Their Implications, 3:1 (2012), 118-133. Gerken, Maike, Bart Rienties, Bas Giesbers and Karen D. Könings. “Enhancing the Academic Internship Learning Experience for Business Education—A Critical Review and Future Directions”. Springer Science+Business Media (2012), 7-22. Print. Gates, Susan M. & Christopehr Paul. Intern Programs as a Human Resources Management Tool for the Department of Defense. Pittsburg: RAND Corporation, 2004. Print. Haq, Asrar Ul. Case study of the Punjab Irrigation Department: Consultancy Report. Lahore: IWMI, 1998. Print. Haddara, Mahmoud and Heather Skanes. “A reflection on Cooperative Education: From Experience to Experiential Learning” Definitions. 2007. Web. 12 April 2014. Read More