Hi! My name is Yihyun Kim, and I’m a third-year Communication Science student at the University of Amsterdam.
From April 2022 to August 2022, I had the pleasure of interning for Yamaha Motor Europe. To briefly introduce what kind of job I had in the company, I was responsible for a press release, writing an internal company news article called ‘Revs+ news article’. The press release covered various news stories regarding the diverse projects which Yamaha Motor Europe is working on. During the process, I had a chance to communicate with the story provider to be provided detailed information and select relevant images to attach. Sometimes, I also had an opportunity to communicate with the Social Media team, regarding posting on various social media platforms, such as Instagram and LinkedIn. The tasks also involve creative work such as designing the webpage, banner, videography, and photography. Moreover, as an intern in the Corporate Communication team, I had a chance to arrange the workshops for employees of YME branches in Europe which were held in June. In particular, in this blog, I would like to talk about the workshop in detail because I learned and felt a lot in this workshop.
Since our company couldn’t hold the workshop for two years due to Covid19, this year there were a lot of Yamaha Motor employees from many countries in Europe who participated in the workshop. So this year when we held the employee workshop, it was a 2-week workshop program for six groups in total. It was a 2-day program for every group, and I was in charge of guiding people and managing situations during the Day2 program. It was definitely not an easy experience because it was my first time leading many people by myself, and because it was the last day of the workshop, I had to consider the time of the participants who had to leave on time to the airport. So, below is a summary of what I learned then.
Overall experience & lessons
- Unexpected things happen – crazy airport situations, participants who need to leave early, tour delays, etc. It is what it is, so respond flexibly.
- Save every contact person that you may need to contact during the workshop
- Bus / Taxi driver (Bus company)
- Reception desk (they helped us a lot)
- Tour guide for warehouse, collection hall, workshop
- Catering lady
- Of course, our dream team members
- Be flexible!
- Time-keeping – small delays cause a huge effect later on, especially on the day when participants have to leave for their flights
- Visitors list for warehouse – Most of the delays happened during the warehouse tour. I guess it’s because we had more participants from YME who wanted to have a tour as well but were not on the list. Small thing but still it gave us so much delay. I think it would be better for next time to also ask participants from YME as well in advance to save us some time.
- Socializing with others – I think I was so bad at this during our workshop especially. But I’m the host who is greeting and taking care of our participants, so it would be nice to try to be close to them during the event. Actually, so it was very nice when I joined the dinner with other participants on Wednesdays because I had a chance to get to know people in advance.
- Sleep enough!
As you can see from the above, it was a tough experience that required multitasking, but on the other hand, it was a very good experience because I was able to meet many people during the short internship period. The most important thing I felt was that communication in real life is really important, and I hope that based on what I have learned here, I can apply it to my future work.