Students help with new support platform
For 10 weeks, Dansk Drone Netværk and Plan2Fly have had the benefit of 5 interns. 5 people with very different backgrounds, from different studies and different experiences, but all selected for an internship precisely because of their individual skills, based on the idea that diversity is a decisive factor when creating something new. The students were given the task of setting up a support system for Plan2Fly. A very open task with freedom to research, brainstorm and initiate the first initiatives. As a representative of the communicative aspects of the process case participant Camilla has written an article about the process.
As a student the job market seems like a distant and perhaps even a little scary future. Therefore, an internship can be extremely valuable when, like us Plan2Fly interns, you are in the final stages of a master’s degree. Of course, this requires that you do not end up in an internship where you, as an intern, are assigned a whole lot of tasks that the permanent employees don’t really bother to take care of themselves, or even worse – you are used as the designated coffee fetcher.
It is scenarios like the one above that the consulting firm Lead the Talent has set out to prevent with their TalentX initiative, which they have created in collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark, Odense Municipality and three “A-kasser”. Lead the Talent puts students in contact with companies that want a team of interns who can work with a case defined by the company.
The current trainees have been assigned to Plan2Fly via the TalentX initiative, in the hope of finally getting some practical experience of some of the things they have learned during their time at university. In other words – they want to combine their knowledge with reality, which is precisely the purpose of an internship.
The team of interns consist of 5 young people with different profiles and educational backgrounds. We are 3 tech geeks – Andreas and Nickolaj who are backend developers, and Max who is a frontend developer. Gonçalo is our finance enthusiast, and Camilla is responsible for the communicative aspects in relation to the case. Together, we form a strong team with many different skills, which gather around the purpose of the case – namely to prepare a customer support solution for Plan2Fly’s drone platform.
We each have our own task to perform in relation to the case, but we have all been involved in brainstorming solutions and options for customer support, precisely to take advantage of our different profiles and skills. We see our differences as a strength that should be exploited, rather than a challenge that stretches our legs.
We have succeeded in developing a support solution for the Plan2Fly platform that gives customers as well as pilots the opportunity to look up the answers to their questions themselves – we are aware that some people would prefer to avoid talking on the phone if they can. In conjunction with this, Camilla has prepared some help articles which contain definitions and explanations of some of the services Plan2Fly offers. At the same time, it will be possible to book a call or send an email, etc., if you cannot find the answer you are looking for. The tech geeks and the finance enthusiast have together programmed a price calculator, based on Gonçalo’s studies and research.
All in all, we have had a good collaboration and learned a lot from each other. We have had plenty of opportunities to put skills from our various studies into play, and thus we have been able to use our abilities in a practical sense. We leave here much wiser on the labor market, and not least ourselves.