It all began my junior year of college. I was attending classes and went to a few clubs, but I knew something was missing. I wanted to be a part of something meaningful, something that would help prepare me for my career after graduating. Since I would like to be a business consultant, my continual goal is to participate and learn more about different aspects of business. After all, if I’ve never worked in marketing, I shouldn't advise someone how to do it better.
Keeping this goal in mind, I decided to do some networking in the area by attending a general membership meeting hosted by the Greater Orlando Organization Development (GOOD) Network. The speakers and attendees there were phenomenal. Successful organizational development and human resource development entrepreneurial consultants and internal organizational development professionals filled the event. By offering my elevator pitch about my consulting goal and aim to learn more about business, I had the pleasure of meeting Isabella Johnston, the founder of Pivot Business Consulting and second company Intern Pursuit software. Isabella explained to me that she founded Pivot Business Consulting and coaches business leaders in areas of leadership growth, creating employee experience processes, team building, team communications, and development of compliant experiential intern programs. She saw an opportunity to scale her system and help interns get job skills and employers document their compliance; thus, Intern Pursuit is a complete system for employers and students to find their ideal match and document their compliance.
Isabella felt that I had a yearning to learn about business development, so she gave me the opportunity to work with her and her team to scale and grow Intern Pursuit. This internship has been a marvelous opportunity for me because when I signed on, Isabella didn’t start assigning me work. Rather, she first asked me about my career, what I hoped to learn about business, listed all the departments in a business, and then had me choose which field I'd like to focus on.
My studies in business and psychology at the University of Central Florida gave me a background in mathematical analysis, but I had little experience in marketing, so I decided to refine that area with Isabella. Working in Isabella’s company Pivot Business Consulting and on Intern Pursuit, I had a multitude of marketing projects to work on. To create outreach for Intern Pursuit, I would craft social media posts. However, there wasn’t just one type of post that I made. Intern Pursuit is multifaceted; it is built on its relationship with students, employers, and academic partners. Therefore, I learned how to make three different posts designing them with different language for their corresponding target audience.
As Intern Pursuit is expanding, its team is expanding as well. To help identify candidates ideal for working with Intern Pursuit, Isabella also gave me the opportunity to participate and help assist with developing the hiring process. Before hiring anyone, I first had to understand the job descriptions available to students interested in working with Intern Pursuit. For example, an Intern Pursuit brand ambassador would be someone who participates in creating content and represents Pivot’s and Intern Pursuit’s services to target employers and academic partners. An Intern Pursuit student influencer creates content to target students in multiple disciplines at an university.
After developing an understanding of what skills Intern Pursuit jobs required, I was also able to help draft the hiring process with Isabella and other team members by developing the survey questions used in hiring applicants. Since Intern Pursuit's an internship provides students with job skills, an important question included in the survey was “What would you like to gain out of an internship?”
My first semester at Pivot Business Consulting focused on Intern Pursuit customer discovery and outreach needs, I challenged myself to grow in marketing. While Isabella taught me many technical skills of marketing such as social media data analytics, I also learned that marketing requires courage. As a perfectionist by habit, I'm quick to get caught up in the details of marketing and fear that what I distribute on a social media channel will be less than perfect. However, the aim of marketing isn't to distribute content that's perfect but rather refine the content message by learning from customer feedback and analytics. What you market is never the final product. However, by having the courage to express yourself and other’s ideas, you'll get better. This particular blog post's a marketing milestone for me. I've never written a blog article before, so this was one way Pivot Business Consulting and the opportunity to work on Intern Pursuit challenged me to step outside my comfort zone to become a better marketer. Marketing's incorporated into most businesses, even business consulting, because I'll have to market myself.
I was invited to intern a second semester with Pivot Business Consulting on Intern Pursuit, this time the focus will be on automating systems. Automation, or making the process run itself without direct support, is an essential feature of many successful companies. One of Intern Pursuit’s missions is to assist employers with the management of intern talent and document compliance to ensure the internships they offer are compliant with the Department of Labor’s criteria for internships, and offer enjoyable, experiential internships. While meeting with each of these employers in person can be highly time consuming, I'm instead helping Isabella to create employer training videos to automate this process and increase the impact of Pivot Business Consulting and Intern Pursuit to more employers. Obviously, training videos can help save time and resources in many businesses.
As I continue to work with Pivot Business Consulting on Intern Pursuit, I'll learn about different aspects of business, so that I can be a better business consultant. One of the great perks about working with Pivot Business Consulting Intern Pursuit Program that Isabella trains employers and HR professions with the new trend of employee experience. There's a flexible work schedule, creative environment, and opportunity to gain experience here that helps prepare an intern for their career, especially if it's one that involves a team dynamic. A really great opportunity I had as an intern was working with Isabella and a few of the intern team members as we planned for Lake Highland Preparatory School’s to our workspace and partner with us on Intern Pursuit.
My experience at Intern Pursuit has changed my life. If you wish to challenge yourself and develop your business skills, I recommend reaching out to Isabella at isabella@internpursuit.tech.