Anastasia is an Anthropology student at Durham University. Over the summer she completed a Market Research Internship with a leading provider of technical training and consultancy services to a range of industries.
Anastasia was tasked with completing a research project which aimed to provide more insight into how various target-audience companies were approaching training. This included research into:
- How companies were allocating their training budgets both in the UK and overseas
- Current training priorities and trends by geographical region
- Competitor analysis, including how competitors market themselves and their products overseas
- Identification of new products that the company can look to offer in order to meet demands.
Anastasia’s line manager Hazel, was very positive about the internship and the work that Anastasia accomplished in the 12-weeks that she spent with them.
“Stacy was very committed to her work. She was punctual, hard-working and very enthusiastic. She got on well with the whole team, had a strong grasp on the objectives and was very clear in the information that she presented.”
A common misconception about internships that students often hold is that an internship is solely for the purpose of gaining experience, in the same vein as work shadowing. This is not the case for Step internships. Every intern makes a valuable and much needed contribution to a business, often completing vital projects or solving problematic business issues.
Anastasia’s internship, like many others, wasn’t straightforward and her work presented challenges. One of the tasks Anastasia was given was to conduct an employer survey regarding attitudes to technical training. One of the issues this task presented was obtaining responses from employers.
Anastasia approached these roadblocks head-on: “Stacy had multiple methods to address the lack of responses from the survey and showed commitment to try and resolve these setbacks. Stacy was very imaginative when it came to solving problems and addressing issues”
Even though there were struggles in the process of obtaining the information, what Anastasia did contribute, during her internships, was vital to the business: “Stacy has been a great asset to the team and generated valuable data and information that can be used to structure our growth strategy. We now possess a lot of detailed information on countries that we target, more than we’ve ever had before. We will use this information generated to form more targeted international strategies and we will look to using further interns in the future.”
If you want more information on how an intern may be of benefit to your business please get in touch. You can email us at Nottingham@step.org.uk or call and speak to a member of our team on 0115 977 5030.