Interpersonal

Interact effectively with others as peers, subordinates and leaders to accomplish goals.

Blog for Summer Internship with the Bank of America

REFLECTION

My blog documents my internship last summer with the Bank of America in Boston. This is when I finally understood that the theories and practices we learned about instructional design in class are actually applied in the real world. It hit me when I was sitting in my cubicle and overheard my colleagues discussing an upcoming project. They were using terms like “the ADDIE model,” “SME” (subject matter expert), and discussing the importance of metrics, that is, evaluating the effectiveness of the training.

My colleagues at the Bank of America were proud of their Instructional Design Master’s degrees. They regularly studied books about the field together each month in a kind of Instructional Design book club. Some were even developing their own instructional design theories and concepts. They were very excited when Allison Rossett was going to speak at an event in Charlotte. That made me proud to have had her for an instructor and to have attended a program that’s so highly regarded throughout the country. Plus I had the guilty pleasure of name dropping to her fans.

This internship is also where I found out what it is actually like to work on a team as a subordinate, co-worker and supervisor of sorts. Throughout my working career I have had co-workers, and sometimes supervised others, but mostly I worked at small companies where I was essentially my own boss, or, as a teacher, I primarily did the instructional design work by myself (though have supervised many students). My experience in having to work with superiors, several co-workers, and subordinates has been limited. In Boston I suddenly found myself part of the largest banking company in the U.S. with 250,000 employees.

The first week I was there I felt a little lost and isolated. My supervisor was nice, but they were in the middle of a major project and she had little time for hand-holding. Luckily she gave me tasks I could do to become acclimated, such as some basic graphic design and learning how to use Lectora.

My initial sense of isolation came from the fact that I wanted to be able to sit down and talk to some co-workers informally over lunch or after work, but no one seemed available. I did not know why at first. Later I found out instead of eating lunch together the team members were holding conference calls nearly every day around noon while eating at their desks.

In fact, only two of our team were physically in the office, myself and Peggy Chopp, my supervisor in the cubicle next door. The rest of were scattered across the country, mostly in New England and North Carolina. However, one of our main members was located in San Francisco. Peggy coordinated our far flung efforts.

Soon I was included in the conference calls and sending and receiving countless emails about our project. When they saw I quickly picked up Lectora on my own and I already knew how to use Captivate, they started fully integrating me into the team. I ended up becoming the “Lectora Guy.” I was in charge of finding and fixing errors in the online training we were creating for a new financial product that was about to be rolled out. My coworker in San Francisco became the “Captivate Guy.” He and I became a team within the team. We worked closely to get everything ready for the rollout. The other team members were in charge of producing chapters that had not been completed yet or writing the assessments.

Despite the distance, through our phone calls and emails we developed a professional, but fun working relationship. For this initial project I acted as a subordinate to Peggy and a supporter to the rest of the team. However, on my next project, the creation of an online training based on one originally delivered live, I became a kind of supervisor.
I had to work with someone in New Hampshire who had the information I needed to complete the project. Peggy asked me to take charge of making sure the project was done. She told me how to deal with the co-worker in New Hampshire to make sure he supplied the material in a timely fashion. At times she encouraged me to email him and at others times, when things were not happening fast enough, she told me it was time to make a friendly phone call to speed him up.

The colleague in New Hampshire and I became friends because we found out we had several things in common. We both had French Canadian heritage and he was learning how to use a 3d animation program that I teach at Grossmont College. Sharing these things allowed us to have a good relationship, even when I had to apply friendly pressure.