Internship What Is an Internship?

Internship What is an Internship? An internship is usually an unpaid job or assignment that allows an individual the opportunity to experience work, in their filed of study prior to the completion of their studies or just after graduation as a form of post graduate studies. Internships are generally a very desirable step in education as they are a sort of working education that allows the individual the opportunity to experience the pace and environment of his or her chosen field without making a long-term employment decision.

Internships also greatly aide industry as they give the employer a relatively low cost labor source that often has insightful and fresh knowledge coming straight from education and can bring new insight to the business and complete desired projects that have gone undone by paid staff for lack of time and labor resources. The internship that I completed was in South Korea, where I interned at a company called LG Household & healthcare as an assistant to a brand manager.

I completed this internship over a three-month term break which allowed me to give the company time that was a closer simulation of paid full time work. This allowed me to see the daily operations of the business from open to close, which gave me a greater insight of how the space and needs change as the day moves forward. The LG company is a multi-national company with interests in several U.S.

firms but is based almost exclusively in South Korea, with four factory locations there, that provide production and support for production. The company has an insightful approach to the work environment, seeking to reward employees with a pleasant environment while they help produce the main product line, household health and beauty products or the secondary products line including small and large household goods like light bulbs and/or even refrigerator or other appliance components and even health food products.

LG and it logo (brand) are recognizable all over the world a providers of quality products and my internship was a substantial step forward in my education. Internship Title As an intern I filled the role of assistant to a brand manager. The marketing team at LG has made significant strides in branding their products and components, in part as a result of their innovative structure.

Brand managers as an overarching goal seek to expand the recognition of the brand and therefore expand its exposure and in turn sales of its products. Recently the company has set out to reduce brand numbers to streamline the process of manufacturing and allow brand managers to focus more effectively on a fewer number of brand names. This allowed the brand managers to better serve the needs of each brand and product line without confusion and with invigorated purpose.

Brand streamlining that has occurred over the last few years has created a need for additional labor to support the "clean up" process of brand close out and focus. It was therefore my role to support the brand manager by helping him collate and organize years of company documentation in the form of individual brand presentations and labeling materials. Promotional materials for all brands had to be logged and cataloged to make it easier for the marketing team to direct its attention toward the remaining brand functions and needs.

This was the bulk of my work as an assistant to the brand manager. Though the work was demonstratively tedious and took up a great deal of my tiem there it did offer me significant insight into the recent history of the company as well as insight into how decisions about brand and recognition are made. Some brands were absorbed and otr eliminated based on sales data and consumer acceptance while others were eliminated as a result of the need to demonstrate greater value in other brand functions.

The brand manager has a large part in making such decisions and then following through with them. This task also offered me a clear view of the history of the company and a better idea of just how vast and influential it is in Korea and elsewhere.

In addition to the collection and cataloging on obsolete brand material I also assisted the brand manager with contact support, answering office phone calls when the office assistant was busy and occasionally returning phone calls for the brand manger so he could be freed up to pick up the line when the contact had been reached. There were additional clerical duties that I performed as well but none worth dwelling on.

A also had some input on new development as streamlining from 14 to 5 brands in the main line of business (cosmetics) required at least some brand overhaul that was taken up by the brand managers and their support teams, of which I was a part. Brand colors, sizes, labeling needs and regulation changes, as well as progress require constant tweaking of even the most recognizable and enduring brands and logos. The brand manager's initial function is to present ideas for some of these necessary functions to a larger marketing team.

In LG marketing is encouraged to come from even the most lowly employee, so even as an intern my ideas were listened to an heeded, especially given my insight into American marketing as a consumer of American products. One of LGs main export markets is the U.S. This observation of my insight was an opportunity of a lifetime and the contacts that I made will likely serve me well in the future.

It is I believe a rare experience to be allowed such close contact with high level marketing personnel and be offered the ability to give lasting input into the marketing of a company of brands, as an intern. Had I known the full scale of my influence from day one I would likely have been even more involved in creating and supporting input for the brand manager.

Marketing Relation Nearly everything I did at LG relates to my marketing degree in some manner, from when I toured the different offices and factory locations to when I answered the phone for the brand manager, as all the functions help give a better understanding of scope and build networking skills. The cataloging and archiving for brand retirement and updating was particularly helpful to me as a marketing major as I gained a much better understanding of the scope and influence of branding and how scientific it is.

According to the brand manager I worked with all the brands being retired had some influence on the market but when he went through each one with me and described why it was streamlined cost and sales dominated the conversation. In some case brands were eliminated due to the complicated nature of manufacturing the physical brand materials, as compared to other brand labels. Other brands were eliminated because product sales, for one reason or another had been lagging for that particular label.

Either way creating an archive of brands was an important step in the process of streamlining that I was privileged to get to do. It is my understanding that some companies simply eliminate brands and then discard all this information, forgetting the hard work that went into their initial development and support and then potentially creating the need to do so work over if the company ever decides to build anew product line using a different or similar brand as one used in the past.

LG is innovative in its record keeping as each brand has a demonstrative attachment to its creator and support team as innovation is a paramount company foundation and innovation seeds personal investment and pride. Marketing is a huge field, with branding only beign a small part of it but at an innovative company like LG there were multiple opportunities for me to gain a better understanding of the area of branding as well as the broader areas of marketing and how it gets done.

Ultimate decisions are frequently made by those in charge but it was refreshing to see how many others influence marketing decisions, including myself a lowly intern. A great number of contacts were also made in and outside of the marketing field so I was able to gain a better understanding of client expectations and the limited knowledge outsiders have about the marketing function of a company which is an issue I have always hoped to help remedy in the world of work.

Marketing was a pervasive aspect of the whole LG business, as even the line workers in the factory demonstrated a desire to continue to create an image for the company that matched its environmental, community and employee goals. The marketing team was in fact responsive to this desire several years ago and built an unprecedented marketing campaign around the whole company philosophy of reward and balance.

This recognition of how all departments and the marketing department work together and how the brand manager fits into that was an essential aspect of the growth I experienced as an intern. Internship Philosophy The philosophy of an internship does not always meet the actual internship experience or the individual's expectations of the employment as many internships can become a drudgery of tasks that no one at the company wants to do and the owner/supervisor does not want to pay anyone to do.

Yet, opportunity to see the inner workings of a company is an essential aspect of the internship that must be harbored beyond the idea of "free labor." Internship supervision and review is essential to this process. One of the ways in which.