Jim Key - Director of Global Marketing at Intrax Internships Abroad
Today’s guest post is brought to you by Jim Key, Director of Global Marketing at Intrax Internships Abroad. Last year, Jim took us through the international job searching funnel starting by preparing for a job abroad, researching potential employers and turning those findings into potential interviews. Now that you know the process, it’s time to narrow down your focus and chose your industry. In this guest post, Jim will teach you about the fascinating world of entrepreneurship and what you can expect working in that field.
In last fall’s series of guest blog posts, we went through how to find an internship overseas and turn it into a job. This winter and spring we will look at a few different categories and why you might consider them for an international internship.
Photo courtesy of Jim Key
Our second category is Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs start businesses in industries ranging from high tech, consulting, freelance marketing work, HR placement & outsourcing, to any other industry you can imagine. I’ve met entrepreneurs who manage art galleries, who produce & distribute wine, and who run incubators (office complexes)…for other entrepreneurs. I’ve also met quite a few who have created and run social enterprises, which are for-profit businesses with a social mission.
So what do entrepreneurs do?
Students often think in terms of majors – is entrepreneurship more like management or accounting or finance or marketing or management information systems? Entrepreneurship is pretty much all of the above, but faster and more unpredictable because entrepreneurship is business in its rawest essence. While an intern in finance or marketing with a large organization may look for a harmonious stream of projects related to that one function, an entrepreneur (and by extension, the intern) can expect a more staccato flow of operations, sales, marketing, product development, crisis management, HR, program execution, finance, and a few more things to be determined on the fly. Students are often taught to think in terms of a Fortune 500 company – an organization that grew from the chaos of a few people working out of a garage to a mature company with a brand, a recognized logo, an office building or a campus as a headquarters, and unique departments for the different functions staffed in proportion to the amount of workflow of each function: Product Development, Engineering, Manufacturing, New Business Sales, Account Management, Marketing, Finance/Accounting, IT, HR, etc. When there are 3 or 8 or even 20 people, everyone does everything and the flow of work is often driven by specific events – a product launch, a large customer’s needs, or a conference that brings together most of your target market. For example, last time I saw one tech startup in the UK, everyone was focused on a weekend music festival (the customer) using their mobile phone app, which had been designed specifically for that festival. Since hundreds of thousands of music lovers would be attending, this firm had a lot riding on getting it right.
Why do students choose to intern with entrepreneurs?
1) Passion – in an entrepreneurial firm, you will be exposed to the zeal of the founder. The founder created the firm and the vision, so they believe in what they are doing with a passion that you rarely see in larger, more mature businesses. The business is much more personal and meaningful to the whole team. Take that passion and double it with the social enterprises – all the mission orientation of a non-profit with the passion (and urgency) of an entrepreneurial founder.
2) Real experience even, if you don’t speak the language – the entrepreneurs that I have met tend to be well-connected, internationally-oriented people. They are often targeting their product or service to a global or at least Europe-wide market. As such, they have great opportunities for interns to do meaningful work and add value even if they are not fluent in the local language, because much cross-border business is done in English. Of course each national culture (and company culture) approaches the challenge of the business environment differently, so you are still getting cultural immersion, but you can often do it even if your French needs some work.
3) Exposure to a variety of functions helps students figure out their strengths – many students are not really sure what they want to do. They often choose a major by the intro class that they liked or what others (parents, teachers, advisors) have suggested that they should do. As an entrepreneurship intern, students get to see operations, finance, sales, marketing, and put out a fire in account management – sometimes all in one day. With that experience, students can identify and gravitate towards what they enjoy and do well.
4) Understanding how organizations work – the flip side of the point above (figuring out what work you like best) is that students see the dynamic of how different functions interact in a small business. Most business classes provide a sense of how finance or marketing or accounting work on their own, but not necessarily together. Unless students take an entrepreneurship classes or discuss the interworking of functions in a strategy or case method class, it is easy to miss the bigger picture of how organizations really work internally.
5) Fast moving environment – there are some who love the structure of a larger organization and the certainty of knowing what they will be doing months before they do it. Others get bored and wonder if the research project they are working on will really impact the company or be read at all. Working for an entrepreneur, the intern often sees a more frenetic pace as she works on varied assignments that are almost always directly related to the success of a firm. Obviously every company is different, but being small often means that they are working close to the margin. What happens today means either a) success & growth or b) closing up shop at the end of the year (especially in this economy), so there is no time to drift. As one student said, “this company has the personality of its founder and its founder is definitely ADD – just like me.”
6) Job Opportunities – we have seen students get job offers and get hired by their internship company in several countries, almost always with small businesses. Why? They can make decisions. Back in the 90’s when I interned abroad in Germany with Opel (GM Europe), my boss liked me and wanted to hire me, his boss liked me and wanted to hire me, but… it was General Motors. It takes about 18 people to agree to make a decision like hiring someone, plus another five to justify hiring a foreigner (requiring all the extra paperwork). When the Founder/CEO of a small firm says “He’s doing a good job, let’s hire him,” it gets done.
In summary, working as an entrepreneur is unstructured because you are creating something new. Students who embrace that challenge can gain meaningful work experience in a dynamic environment, learn more about themselves, and get a better sense of what they want to do.
great posts ,,… hope to see more post…