Monday, November 23, 2015

Reputation

This past summer I interned at Aon Hewitt as a Setup Configuration Specialist, where within my team and among the interns I developed a reputation as a reliable team member who could make contributions on complicated projects. This role was primarily technical in that my responsibilities generally included database testing and configuration. However, there was a communication component to it, in that I had to work vertically and horizontally with senior members of my team to help them with their tasks. Once I became familiar with the system, I took it upon myself to manage my time well so that my primary tasks would be done early so that I could reach out to other members of the team to help them with complete their tasks.

Essentially, I just worked hard and resisted shirking in an environment and role where I could have done so easily without being detected. Many of my fellow interns often shirked or just chose to work slowly and only do the work they were given because that was the expectation set by our managers. Of course, I would sometimes wish that I could just relax and take it easy like them, but I didn't allow myself to do this. I set expectations for myself that I would work hard and prove that I had a lot of potential as an employee going into the internship. I did this because  I was uncertain about the level of competition that there would be among the interns for a full time offer, and as such wanted to put myself ahead of the pack so that I would increase my chances of "winning" an offer. A large part of this was to maintain a high level of productivity and to make myself noticed within the team by constantly reaching out to help others with their work. This slowly built my reputation as a competent employee and new expectations were set to match my level of performance. I generally worked to enhance it further by negotiating with more experienced team members to do some of their clerical or meaningless work in exchange for putting me on more advanced projects.  The conversation generally went like this, "Hey Jared, I see that you have to do four test plans by the end of the day, but that activity setup looks interesting. If I do those test plans for you could you put me on the setup," which almost always resulted in a sigh of relief and a yes. I think this helped me to further improve my reputation because it showed that I wanted to learn more and take on more responsibility. This reputation was important to maintain for me because I wanted to have the assurance that if I ended up winning and accepting an offer, that I would have a good head start on my career to move up the ranks faster.

I never did "cash in" my reputation, but building it did serve to get me the job offer. The competition was not as fierce as I had anticipated, half of the interns received offers, but building my reputation there made me feel very comfortable as I searched for alternative offers. Upon letting them know that I accepted an alternative offer, some were rather gracious in my decision while others were fairly upset, but I guess that was to be expected regardless.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting, another student posted on essentially the same topic (though he was interning at a different company). Did you have much interaction with the other interns? If so, what was the nature of that? Were you equally as helpful with them?

    You also said that the interaction you had were both vertical and horizontal. I believe I understood the vertical part. But the horizontal part went right by me. Perhaps you could explain that in a way I can understand it.

    You said you've not cashed in on this reputation. Have you accepted the job offer from this company? If you negotiated for a hire salary but then you took a job elsewhere, because you liked the other place better and it matched or bettered the salary offer, that would be a kind of cashing in. If you didn't have any other offers, there really wasn't an opportunity to cash it in, was there?

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  2. I had a lot of interactions with the other interns, we all became quite good friends. The program was structured so that one or two interns would be placed in a client team so we all had different managers and different projects going on. There were some who didn't care to compete for the position because they knew immediately it wasn't what they wanted to do and just wanted the internship as a resume builder. Being a part of the same group, anytime one of us was able to help it was always given freely, in part because of the spirit of collegiality between us, but I identified the fact that helping the others would make me look good, so I never had a reason not to. I think the others used this to their competitive advantage as well so everyone had something to gain by helping and asking for help.

    I did not end up accepting the offer from Aon Hewitt (AH). I definitely leveraged my analytics experience but to my knowledge my references were not contacted. I received and accepted an alternative offer in an entirely different field in consulting because it aligned with my career goals better and paid substantially better, beyond what AH was willing to negotiate to. I think, had they contacted my references, then that would have been cashing in on my reputation because they would - hopefully - say good things but then lose a potential employee.

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