COMM 368 - (Pt. 2) Connecting to Career-readiness competencies

How my internship experience at Waters Edge Winery connects to and enhanced my career-readiness competencies.

What are the NACE career-readiness competencies?

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) "Career-Readiness Competencies" are a collection of eight necessary and vital skills that prepare college students for the professional world and help them maintain their careers in the long-term.

These competencies include:

1. Career and Self Development

2. Leadership

3. Communication

4. Professionalism

5. Critical Thinking

6. Teamwork

7. Equity and Inclusion

8. Technology

Having a high affinity for these skills is essential for developing oneself into not only a well-rounded and valuable worker, but as a person as well. The purpose of this blog entry is to reflect on my internship experience at Waters Edge Winery and identify the competencies I improved upon, as well as assess those that require finer tuning.

Practicing professional communication habits

Being a marketing and social media internship, communication is a competency that I had plenty of time to enhance. Coming into the internship, I believed communication to be one of my strongest competencies. I feel that I get along well with people and communicate in a clear and straightforward manner, but I found that I needed to make some adjustments to better fit a professional setting.

Early on in the internship, I was tasked with shadowing our marketing manager on a visit to Operation Smile Inc., where we were given a tour and eventually sat down to discuss having the winery sponsor Operation Smile's upcoming event. While my manager took the lead for the better majority of the meeting, I was given opportunities to constructively contribute to the discussion. I felt some nervousness in these moments and tried to keep a calm and relaxed demeanor to hide the first-real-meeting nerves. However, I found that maintaining my regular tone and casual body language while communicating was ultimately hindering our progression towards a deal.

I quickly came to realize that, because I wasn't communicating in a way that showed Operation Smile's event manager that we were serious about reaching an agreement, I was inadvertently causing them to care less about an immediate decision being made. After leaving with an uncertain but positive response to our offer, I asked my manager for advice on how I should communicate with potential partners.

He emphasized to me the importance of appearing attentive and involved without being too overwhelming or relaxed with how I communicate. He gave me much needed pointers on posture and tone when communicating in a professional setting, as well as reiterated the value of quality over quantity. Later in the week, I was able to hone my competency communicating in a professional manner while networking at a private tasting event -- hosted by Waters Edge -- for wholesalers and local business owners to sample our products. The atmosphere of the winery was much more social and light than the grey-scale meeting room from days prior, which made for a great environment to practice good communication habits without the stress of messing up a deal.

I spent the better part of the event reminding myself about various communication habits and figuring out how to adjust to each person I spoke to. I found that those attending the event were generally more open to purchasing wine in bulk when I upheld these habits, especially when I maintained good posture and light but on-topic dialogue. Working the private tasting was a wake-up call for me and emphasized the importance of practicing good verbal and nonverbal communication habits in a professional setting.

Learning the value of professionalism

Prior to the internship, my belief was that professionalism stemmed from good manners and solid time management, which is partly true. However, because I had only worked restaurant jobs, I had never been put in an environment that emphasized professionalism quite like one in marketing. I found myself wholly unfamiliar with the process of having set deadlines for different stages of a project and developed a heightened awareness of how I presented myself to clients and customers in both my appearance and my work.

This internship experience drastically improved my competency as a professional simply because it demanded it of me. Before this internship, professionalism was not a top priority for me due to most of my previous jobs lacking a real need for constant, upstanding professionalism; tasks were routine and mundane, while the managers were the furthest thing from strict about employee policies. I came to realize that I can't have the same laxness during this internship while creating promotional content for Eric Hawkins' Tiny House Village in Cape Charles. In exchange for a wine club membership and a free night's stay in the tiny village, I was tasked with editing the winery's promotional content shot on the village's grounds the week prior. By this point in the internship, I had begun working with Virginia Video and, while having responsibilities with the winery, was given the task of creating and editing paid promotional content for the Tiny House Village as well.

While I enjoyed the uniquely relaxing experience of staying in a tiny house, the context of my stay made me feel more conscious of my professional appearance in spite of the fun atmosphere. I had spent the morning of the shoot trying to decide what clothes were appropriate and spent the rest of the day doing my best to be hard-working and well-mannered. Given a 9 a.m., next-morning deadline to complete the first batch of content, I realized that I had to uphold a good professional image for not only myself, but for both Waters Edge and Virginia Video. Getting both tasks done by the next morning not only gave me confidence in my ability to complete deadline work but also helped me better understand the way I should manage my time to meet the later phases' deadlines.

While I don't think professionalism is the competency I excel at the most, I do believe this internship has caused it to be the most improved. Since beginning the internship, I've found myself to be more disciplined about completing assignments thoroughly and in a timely manner, as well as more concerned with presenting myself positively and professionally to others -- both at work and in my daily life. I believe these are valuable traits of strong professionalism that I can continue to improve upon in the future, as many of the positions I hope to pursue require a strong professional identity and dedication to the work. Because marketing for Waters Edge frequently gives me in new and sometimes daunting tasks, I often felt motivated to hold a high professional standard in every facet of my work. I hope to improve my competency going forward in order to build a strong professional identity and open myself up to new opportunities in the future.

Getting in touch with technology

During my time creating and editing content for the winery, I wanted to improve my competency with technology, especially with newer technology that could become essential for my work in the future. While I was frequently around camera setups and microphone rigs, my primary focus was improving my literacy with topics surrounding software, such as Adobe Premiere Pro and media algorithms. With understanding the latter growing rapidly in terms of importance to a business' online presence, understanding the way a large-scale audience communicates through engagement and responding effectively will be a valuable skill to have in any field of communication.

My first two weeks of the internship were heavily focused around analyzing social media engagement in order to identify content that "hit the algorithm" and replicate it for future posts. Over the course of these weeks, I was tasked with studying the user engagement trends of relevant (wine-related), popular accounts, as well as the Waters Edge social media's, and identify the types of posts and content the algorithm favors. By the end of the two weeks, I was to make four pieces of content using these posts as reference -- three short-form clips for Meta services and one long-form ad for YouTube.

After studying the characteristics of high-engagement content and keeping track of the metadata that popular posts had in common, I got some editing experience with Premiere Pro while creating similar videos for the winery. Once these videos were posted, I was taught how to analyze more precise measurements of engagement, focusing primarily on click-through-rate (CTR), watch time, audience demographics, and site traffic. After getting to study the results of my videos, I found several algorithmic trends stood true. For example, montage clips of the wine that ran for 10 seconds or more and had royalty-free music had average engagement but above-average CTR, while 6-8 second videos with simple text/graphics received more engagement but yielded less site traffic. One video (see video #2 on the pt. 1 blog post) fit into neither criteria, running for just under 30 seconds and consisting of only brief frames of stock images, simple text, and a vocal recording. However, this video ended up with the highest view count, audience engagement, and CTR, showing that frequent use of simple graphics and text hold viewers attention span longer and garner the most interest.

Getting to study and analyze audience engagement on several platforms has given me valuable insight into what goes into each post and how businesses track and utilize audience feedback on media platforms to boost their online presence and overall image. Because audience analytics on digital platforms play an ever-growing role in the tactics and decisions of any organization, having the skills to read and predict algorithmic trends is only going to become more sought after in the future. Considering that I plan to pursue a public relations position within the government, the experience I've gained from this internship could very likely open up new opportunities in the long-term to track the online feedback of government organizations or political entities. I hope to continue broadening my competency with algorithm technology by getting more involved with Waters Edge's social media operations and staying up to date with software changes in the digital platforms.

The Flaws

While this internship has given me plenty of necessary experience to enhance my career-readiness competencies, there were a couple categories that I didn't gain much improvement with. Although, the reason for my scarce improvement with these traits shouldn't be attributed to an absence of them in my internship experience, but rather because I only needed to use them at a fundamental level. The two competencies I believe I could continue to work on are teamwork and inclusion/equity, as both saw little improvement during my internship.

While teamwork was used for just about every task assigned to me, there were very few times where the team was driven to handle a problem as a group. While teamwork is necessary for any kind of group-based task, I often found myself completing my work and resolving issues individually. I believe I had a fairly strong competency for teamwork prior to working at Waters Edge and it allowed me to help group tasks run smoothly, but there were very few moments that tested my ability to work in a team or required immediate improvement. Most in-person tasks required very basic teamwork and the team continued to function properly when collaborating through OneDrive. I still firmly believe there's plenty for me to learn about teamwork and even more experience to be gained, but I felt as though the marketing and media team was very rarely faced with a task that required extensive teamwork.

I feel very similarly about my growth with equity and inclusion. I'm a firm believer in "treat others how you want to be treated" and have never seen ethnicity, culture, gender, etc. as a reason to change that, nor do I believe it was a factor in any marketing decisions I was involved in. That being said, I'm not insinuating that Waters Edge doesn't practice equity and inclusion. I believe my lack of improvement in this category is because we never had to make a case for it; everybody is welcome at the winery because wine brings people together. I'd put a specific example here if I had one, but we were never faced with a situation where we had to work on equity and inclusion. I'm not entirely sure how I plan to improve my competency in this category, other than to continue upholding strong morals and accept people for who they are.

Final Reflection

Looking back on my internship, I can confidently say that this experience has pushed me out of my comfort zone in a truly positive way, encouraging development and growth while preparing me for the demands of pursuing a career in communication. This internship has helped me drastically improve my competency in almost every category, given me confidence in my professional identity and skills, and motivated me to continue perfecting my craft in order to pursue a communication career. While I know there is still much for me to learn, my time at Waters Edge has been nothing but constructive and valuable. I plan to continue working with the winery in a more permanent position and further develop my professional skills and reputation while attending graduate school.