Internship Experience
Read below to explore my internship details, artifacts, and reflection.
Internship Details
For my internship experience, I worked for Redi-Group North America (RGNA). RGNA is a third-party quality assurance company with a location in Charleston, SC. RGNA at the Charleston location mainly partners with various automotive companies, manufactures, and suppliers to ensure quality of products, production, and processes.
Throughout my internship experience I worked directly with the Project Coordinator. The Project Coordinator’s main roles were to manage employee performance, coordinate inspections, re-works, and sorts, and to ensure all processes are running appropriately and effectively. My goal going into this experience was to provide deliverables and solutions for the Project Coordinator that would improve the quality of his position as well as the companies processes and challenges.
Throughout my internship I created deliverables such as a summative evaluation report, work instructions per project, a job aid, and a final reflection. In addition to my deliverables, my mentor and I had several problem-solving conferences. The purpose of these conferences was to discuss struggles the company was facing and possible solutions regarding employee retention, employee and management training, and how to improve the efficiency of day-to-day processes.
Artifacts & Reflection
One of my deliverables was a summative evaluation report. My mentor and RGNA already had a training program/process implemented. However, the company was struggling with employee understanding of expectations/assignments and job performance.
My summative evaluation report analyzed employee initial training and retention of information to evaluate the training in place and offer recommendations for improving the implemented process.
At the end of my internship, my mentor implemented the newly designed employee audit forms/process and was able to utilize this process to improve training gaps/issues. He noted that he experienced an increase in employee understanding and the new process streamlined his ability to pinpoint which employees he needed to focus on supporting.
Another deliverable I created was work instructions for projects/employees. At RGNA, they handle multiple projects at a time and employees can be moved between projects with limited notice. This limited notice causes a minimal amount of time allotted for employee training. This leads to poor employee understanding/performance due to the cognitive load of remembering large amounts of information and being expected to apply the information. I created work instructions that could be posted at the job location for employees to review when needed to ensure successful operations/performance.
Work instructions are only necessary for detailed and lengthier projects. Due to this, the creation of job aids were appropriate for simple assignments or day(s)-week long projects. A job aid was created to assist employees in remembering a sequence of steps to follow to ensure all appropriate measures were taken. This decreased employee mistakes and increased performance.
As previously stated, a large portion of my experience was conducting problem solving conferences with my mentor. Through these conferences, I was able to be an asset to my mentor by providing various perspectives on adult learning and understanding. In addition, I was able to provide solutions to enhance employee culture/climate, retention of information and understanding.
At the end of my internship experience there were three main areas I improved in. One is the understanding of the necessity of efficient and real-time employee performance data collection. Second is, the necessity of management to be trained in adult and cognitive learning theory, which lead to me understanding my value of being a member of the team. Lastly, is the improvement I personally made in the areas of problem solving, creation of job aids and independently conducting an evaluation with real-world context. The opportunity of my internship has provided me with a deeper understanding of my work within career fields outside of education. In addition, it increased my confidence in my work abilities within instructional design and development.