I have always wondered how it was going to be to work at a Fortune 500 company. Will it be very different compared to the start-up company? Keeping this question in mind, I started my internship at Michelin.
Looking back to the entire internship, I have had a lot of memorable moments. It was the first time I was involved in many activities, including news production, annual meeting video shooting, employee interview, corporate governance design, workshop design, external visit procedure, etc. I have learned a lot during this internship by doing multiple tasks, which gives me an excellent opportunity to discover my genuine interest and find out what career realm I want to do in the future.
The most important thing that I learned from the internship is confidence. I am not a confident student at school; I was shy when I was doing the presentation in front of my classmates, even though we had known each other for a long time. I was too comfortable when I had to talk to others to express my opposing ideas, even though I had a point. I was always afraid that I was not good enough to persuade others, even though I prepared well. Because of these reasons, I had to spend a long time cheering myself up before doing these things. But the work pushed me forward, and I have to trust myself first, then my words will be regarded as credible, making other people believe me.
The second thing that I learned is the importance of teamwork, and I believe that everyone has different competencies. At first, I wanted to know everything; I wished I could edit the videos by myself as a professional, but I ignored we only have 24 hours a day, and we need to have our priorities.
The last thing that I would like to highlight in the internship is the company’s management system. Top-down management is not sustainable in talent management. Culture and people are the two top topics that a company needs to take into consideration. Making the employees empowered and sustainable is the key to success in transformation during the new era.
I will recommend my friends to apply for the internship at Michelin because it is very flexible. We can collaborate with different departments, and we will have the opportunity to finish our internship cross-department. The internship journey was collective intelligent, and the senior employees are generous, always be willing to offer help to interns. The most important thing is, they value the intern’s voice and rights.