Hi! 🙂
In this blog post, I am going to give you insights on my internship at Rituals and some “Big Sis’ Advice”, which basically means that I will try to take away your fears and worries and prepare you for your new chapter!
First, a little background information: I started as a “Commercial Retail Development Intern” inside the Retail Operations department at Rituals on February 15th. My internship will end on August 15th, so the duration of my internship is six months. I work 40 hours a week, mostly from 09:00 AM to 05:00 PM. Sometimes, when we have events, store build-ups, or just a lot of workload, the timings vary a little bit. My main workplace is the CHO (central head office) at Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. However, at the beginning, I also had to work in a Rituals store, just like every other Rituals employee who works in Retail. This is done so office employees see things from a different perspective as they are the ones making the decisions about the stores, so it is really important that they understand the other point of view. The main tasks of my role are, as stated in the vacancy; “supporting the development of the commercial briefings and calendars for all markets worldwide, assisting in gaining insights into customer experience, supporting commercial and operational projects (e.g. Shop challenges, Holiday Season) and collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive operational excellence and deliver exceptional customer experiences”.
As you may have noticed, I have many different tasks. That can be challenging and overwhelming but at the same time super fun and exciting. It just depends on your mindset, the communication, the people you work with and for how long you have been interning. With that, I mean that at the beginning, it will probably be overwhelming. Especially if you, just like me, have never pursued a corporate internship at a big company before. And that is totally normal! You will notice that, the further you are in your internship, the easier everything gets. Which makes sense because it is a process, a ‘learning by doing’ experience!
A few things I would recommend to anyone who is going to start their (first) internship or to myself four and a half months ago would be:
- Ask for feedback regularly! Receiving feedback is crucial for constant growth and improvement. Also giving feedback is an important skill to have. Communication in general is so important. If you want more responsibility, you feel like the workload is too high, you feel stressed, or anything like that, tell your manager or supervisor and don’t keep it to yourself, otherwise it will eat you up inside.
- Don’t neglect your study! This is something I am very guilty of as I wanted to give 100% at work, so I did not do much for my study during working hours (although you are supposed to spend 1/3 of your working hours working on your research) and because I always had a lot of stuff to do, I did not have the time to work on it. However, this is also again related to the first point; you have to communicate to your manager that you also need time to work on your research report, they will not address it themselves!
- Learn to say no! This one was also very hard for me but it soo important as it will become too much workload otherwise.
Well, this was it for now! I hope that this post can help some people who will be starting an internship soon or who have already started!
See ya! 🙂