Summer holidays aren’t all deck chairs and beach huts
As the latest crop of Cisco interns found out…
July and August saw a buzz of activity as 60 university students from around the world descended on Cisco to gain work experience and consider us for a future career.
The programme consisted of 10 weeks with the first six being spent with account managers and then the remaining being divided into engineering and marketing tracks. My focus was the marketing track and so after much sweat and tears, and what seemed like years of planning, we were ready to go.
The start of things to come…
The interns met with John Chambers and Chuck Robbins, went to visit customers, and shadowed various people from around Cisco. It was a great way to develop their knowledge and gain a valuable insight to working at Cisco. Added to their busy schedule, and in typical Cisco style, they were also given the opportunity to give something back, and do some work for charity. But it wasn’t all work and no play, and we provided various social events to allow everyone to unwind and bring the teams together.
There were a number of projects given to the interns including account management and research. The engineers were able to visit the Customer Proof of Concept lab and take part in a Hackathon; and the marketeers created videos and projects around Partner Marketing, the Internet of Everything and Social Media.
Each week the results were presented back to us which created a real win-win situation. The interns learnt about Cisco and what we’re like as an employer; and we benefited from gaining new ideas from people outside of the business. Hopefully they’ll also take their experience back into their universities and spread the word that Cisco is a great place to work!
I had as much fun creating the Partner Marketing projects as the interns had taking part. To Cisco’s credit, every single intern decided to take part in the optional assessment programme to try and get a permanent role.
But don’t just take my word for it! Hear it from the horse’s mouth and read a post from one of the interns themselves: http://gblogs.cisco.com/uki/my-time-as-an-intern-at-cisco/
