I joined Huawei Technologies Netherlands on 1st April 2020 as a project management intern. Huawei Technologies is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. The firm is committed to a fully connected, intelligent world for every person, home, and organization. It has nearly 194,000 employees, and it operates in more than 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world. The company has three main business groups, carrier business group, consumer business group, and enterprise business group. Each of the business group functions in a different area of the market. Huawei Technologies Netherlands currently focus on a big project in the carrier business group. The project I was assigned to work with was the Mobile Network Modernization project. It was to help the customer company to swap their mobile network from 4G to 5G.
I started the internship during the pandemic. The experience throughout the whole internship period was quite unique. I experienced the combination of working in the office and working from home. At the beginning of the internship, I needed to be familiar with the project and the tasks so I started working in the office while most of the colleagues were working from home. Everyone had to wear masks every day at the office. In the first month, I didn’t even know what most of my colleagues looked like. After I became familiar with my tasks, I started working from home and occasionally went to the company to meet with colleagues for meetings. While working from home, I arranged calls with my colleagues every day to align the tasks and goals.
When I just started at the company, I knew nothing about project management. It was quite difficult for me at first because some of the tasks have certain requirements for technical knowledge background. My first week at the company was mainly to familiarize myself with the project and start to work on some simple tasks gradually. My colleagues and the online Huawei community helped me a lot through the beginning stage of the internship. Huawei has an online community and an online study environment called “Huawei University”. It contains many related courses and tests from different departments. The courses and test languages are in both English and Chinese. Users can enrich themselves by learning knowledge from Huawei University according to their own time and needs. In the Huawei online community, colleagues from across the world share their experiences and tips on different subjects. In my opinion, the Huawei University and online community were very helpful. In the initial stage of my internship, I used Huawei University very often. It answered my doubts and clarified my confusion.
As a project management assistant, my role in the team was to coordinate with different parties involved in the project to make sure the working progress was aligned. I have learned a lot from this internship experience. The organizational culture of Huawei has inspired me. The employees at Huawei have strong spirits. While I was part of the project, I witnessed my colleagues accomplishing goals, making impossible into possible, and create records. I was proud to be part of the project and work with such a motivated team.