International Business Management Internship

Introduction

Reflective report is a summary of one’s own learning acquired from a past experience or an undertaken project. Highlights of key learning aspects as well as challenges faced in the past are summarised in reflective reports to guide the future career of an individual. This reflective report is all about my past experiences of starting and completing an internship at Appsy Technology, a London based IT company. Knowledge gained from this internship as well as identified gaps for my personal compatibility during this internship engagement are summarised in this reflective report. Guiding my future journey based on the learnt skills and knowledge from the internship is also planned within this reflective report.

Knowledge gained and its helpfulness in the workplace

My internship at Appsy Technology has taught me about the cores of digital marketing as I was responsible for practicing field marketing for the company. I was also engaged in a 3 week crash course on digital marketing during my internship that helped me to learn basics of social media marketing, E-mail marketing and SEO marketing content creation. These digital marketing skills adopted by me have helped me to perform my responsibility with greater expertise as I was applying newly learnt skills for the marketing activities of the company. As per the depiction of Liu and Hodgins (2018), skills acquired from course participation and an individual being able to apply those into real practice improves personal compatibility. During my internship days, I also get to learn about being self-motivated and practice actions with a positive attitude. This helped me to deliver highly productive performance outcomes as a marketing associate of Appsy Technology. I was taking challenges with a positive attitude on a regular basis and delivered object oriented marketing support during my internship. Apart from this, I also have learnt the best approach of decision making from the internship that has helped me to make decisions for the company’s marketing strategy with desired process planning. As per the proposition of Allen et al. (2018), learning by doing actions is a core process of self-development for an individual. As I was unable to implement a plan in real practice during the first days of my internship, it has pushed me to make changes on my own and slowly reach up to a point where I could deliver desirable outcomes for the company. I have learnt to develop confidence in myself through the internship that has helped me to omit fear of action participation in the workplace. As a result of this, I have become a confident personality that takes responsibility on its own and completes a task with greater effort and desired outcome achievement. My knowledge about cross-cultural communication has also improved through the internship that has helped me to be an effective team player for the company.

I also have gained adequate knowledge and skills of IT processes that have helped me to perform digital marketing practices with satisfactory outcomes. My nervousness has also reduced as I learnt about managing a task outside my own expertise level. As per the proposition of Maravilhas and Martins (2019), an individual performing outside his own expertise level requires courage and confidence to engage in the task. In this regard, the knowledge gained by me about being confident for every situation and using pursued situational understanding has helped me to act outside my expert areas during the internship. As the internship has taught me to accept mistakes and learn from it for future practices, thus, I have become more confident to solve new problems and deliver satisfactory performance outcomes for the company. As an example, my role of designing a marketing plan for Appsy Technology during my internship was a practice that I had not any past experience. As per the depiction of Bird (2019), creative thinking and finding impactful solutions for problems is one of the key entrepreneurial competence that an individual might have in them to meet professional success. Knowledge gained about creative solution planning and solving problems with communication from the internship has helped me to design a marketing plan for the company with appropriate business objectives to meet.

Transferable skills developed

Transferable skills that I have developed from my internship tenure are significant as critical situational thinking, adaptive to changes as per the required actions, leadership as well as effective communication and team play competence. As a marketing intern for Appsy Technology I was practicing constant decision making and problem solving for different situations. As a result of this, I have certainly developed the transferable skills of applying critical thinking for every situation and determining the best possible actions to practice for any given situation. As per the shared perspective of Mahanal et al. (2019), critical thinking skills of an individual raises the competence of actionable probe impact as critical thinking develops acute understanding of appropriate course of action to follow. Due to this, the transferable skill of critical thinking of a situational background and planning my actions accordingly has developed in me through the internship role practice. Apart from this, leadership transferable skills have also developed by me during my internship as I was playing the role of leading and guiding my team subordinates for different marketing practices for Appsy Technology. As an intern marketer of Appsy Technology, I get to play leadership roles during my internship in terms of guiding and supervising some of the other interns to accomplish marketing goals of the company. As per the shared opinion of Griffith et al. (2019), leadership competence development for an individual leverages comprehensive credibility of enlisting collaborative growth for a group setting workforce. My internship role for the company has certainly developed my leadership transferable skills in terms of understanding the best way of guiding and helping other group members to act upon a common goal. In addition to this, I have also learned about my own role as a leader during the internship that has supported my action for being beneficial for a larger group instead of my own benefits.

On the other hand, the transferable skills of communication competence have developed in me from the internship practices as I was required to maintain continuous communication with the marketing heads of the company. I was engaged in regular information communication with the marketing heads of Appsy Technology that has certainly improved my communication skills. As per the explanation of Karnieli-Miller (2020), communication skills development for an individual requires practicing the action of engaging in regular interaction with others and getting hands-on experience of public interaction. In this regard, as an intern marketer of Appsy Technology and playing the role of communication information with others on a regular basis has certainly improved my communication skills. In addition to this, my practice of communicating with my peers about their market research finds and conveying the information to marketing heads of Appsy Technology has also contributed to the development of my communication skills. Apart from this, team playing transferable skill development for me is also an outcome of my internship practices. As per the views of Varela and Mead (2018), teamwork skill development for an individual requires motivation of proactively taking part in group work activities and adapting understanding of appropriate team playing approaches. In this regard, engaging in different group marketing activities and working with diverse individuals to accomplish common goals has improved my teamwork transferable skill. Thus, my internship session has contributed to the development of key transferable goals that are required to meet professional success as marketing executives of a company.

Gaps in my skills and knowledge

Acting as a marketing intern at Appsy Technology has highlighted that I have the knowledge gap of information understanding and I was lacking the skill of handling data to generate valuable insights to practice action. As marketing executives are responsible for researching marketing conditions and designing marketing plans for the company accordingly, thus, I was not able to perform my responsibilities effectively at the beginning. This was due to the mentioned knowledge and skill gaps of understanding data handling operations. As per the proposition of Mikalefet al. (2018), data understanding skills and ability to handle data for good use is one of the key skill sets for modern day professional practice. My skill gap of poor data understanding credibility and not being able to use available data for action planning was identified during my internship tenure as I was facing complexity of conducting market research for the company. Apart from this, I was also lacking confidence to take responsibilities on my own during my internship days, which signifies a key skill gap for me. This skill gap has restricted me to practice marketing tasks confidently at the initial days of my internship and resulted in poor performance outcome as a professional marketer of Appsy Technology. Moreover, this skill gap has also reduced my action impact for researching a market for the company and planning appropriate marketing initiatives for the employer. On the other hand, I was also lacking the skill of using digital marketing tools due to the knowledge shortage about IT principles and handling of digital social media marketing platforms for the company. As per the proposed explanation of van Laaret al. (2020), digital skill is one of the most important individual competence sets that is essentially required to be competent for handling modern day business functions. In this regard, my digital skill gap was one of the main reasons behind my poor performance as an intern marketer of Appsy Technology at the initial days.

On the other hand, I was also lacking problem solving and decision making skills to act as an expert marketer of the company as I was not competent enough to apply creative thinking for every situation at the beginning. This knowledge and skill gap has restricted me to accomplish my performance target as I was not able to plan my actions to solve any problems. As per the depiction of Khoiriyah and Husamah (2018), creative thinking based problem solving competence approach for an individual exerts direct positive impact on the final outcomes of every action. Due to this, my skill and knowledge gap of creative thinking inability and poor problem solving approach has impacted my performance outcomes negatively as an intern marketer of the company. Apart from this, I was also having the gap of low experience of handling organisational marketing activities at the beginning as the internship was my first opportunity to take part in marketing activities of an organisation. Due to this, I lacked knowledge about core marketing principles to follow and appropriate actions to practice for designing a proper marketing plan for the company. These knowledge and skills gaps were present in me during my initial days of internship journey that impacted my overall performance outcome as an intern marketer of Appsy Technology.

Overcoming the gaps for my future learning and career

The knowledge gap of information understanding would be overcome by enrolling in a basic data operation course in order to fasten my learning for the future and attain a level of satisfactory career perspective. Data operation course will help to learn about the basics of information processing principles and the right way of applying data to plan my future actions. Apart from this, the data operation course will also raise my competence of using data software such as Microsoft Excel so that I can have adequate expertise of professional attributes required for a successful career. As per the statement of Akhtar et al. (2019), big data understanding and handling skills development for an individual requires a professional training course to master this skill. In this regard, enrolling in a data operation course I will be able to overcome this skill gap in me in terms of acquiring learning for the future and evolving as an expert professional for a successful career. Apart from this, my skill gap of lacking confidence to take responsibility on my own would be overcome by placing myself in constant challenging situations and learning from experiences of acting upon an unknown situation. As a result of this, I would be able to develop confidence about not fearing any unknown situation to act upon it and overcome my skill gap. As per the depiction of Wright et al. (2020), consideration of engaging in challenging tasks and putting self on tests by an individual is one of the most appropriate approaches to build confidence. In this regard, putting myself in challenging tasks on a regular basis would certainly help me to overcome my confidence gap skill.

Apart from this, my skill gap about using digital marketing tools will be overcome by getting a professional certificate for online marketing and learning about the basics of computer operation. This professional course training would certainly raise my competence of handling digital marketing tasks appropriately and help overcome my skill gaps. As per the shared perspective of Langan et al. (2019), digital marketing professional course improves credible knowledge and basic skills of performing digital marketing operations for an individual. Thus, taking a digital marketing professional training course I will be able to overcome my skill gap. On the other hand, the problem solving and decision making skill gap of mine would be overcome by placing myself in constant challenging situations and learning to apply a logical approach of planning a course of action. This would allow me to improve my decision making and problem solving skills to enrich my professional competence and achieve a successful career in the future. As per the shared opinion of Klein and Crandall (2018), problem solving and decision making skill development for an individual requires mental simulation training to master it. In this regard, my approach of placing myself in challenging situations constantly and learning to apply logic to plan my actions would help me to overcome my decision making and problem solving skill gap. In this way I could remove my knowledge and skill gaps for future learning and improve my professional competence to meet career objectives that I have planned for me. Thus, the mentioned actions would help me to overcome my knowledge gaps effectively and make me an evolving personality with highest professional competence.

Conclusion

My internship journey as a marketing executive of Appsy Technology has taught me about key professional competencies that an individual must possess to meet professional success. I get to learn about appropriate leadership competencies, team communication attributes and creative thinking ability from my internship journey. Transferable skills of creative thinking change adaptive personality as well as leadership and teamwork competencies are improved in me from the internship journey. I have identified that self-confidence, data handling skills as well as digital marketing skills were lacking in me that was resisting me to deliver satisfactory performance as an intern. Apart from this, decision making and problem solving skills were also lacking in me as I have identified them during my internship. Due to this, I have planned to enrol myself in training courses to overcome this knowledge and skill gaps so that I could become professionally competent to reach a successful career.

References

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