Going into this internship I assumed the skills I would gain would be mostly technical and that I would finish with a list of tools I could use and software I understood. That did happen, but the things I’ve noticed developing most aren’t just that. The most useful ones have come from the overlap between the work itself and being a foreigner while doing it.
A soft skill I’ve developed most is working without a method. One several projects I was given a goal not a process with no template, no list of approved sources, and no instruction on how deep to go. Early on I read that as instructions being incomplete. I’ve come to see it as a normal condition of real work, and the skill is being willing to start anyway, build a plan as you go, and adjust when you learn you were pointed slightly wrong. Another habit thats tied to that is asking questions. When something specific is blocking me, I ask straight away rather than guessing to look self sufficient. But when the uncertainty is bigger I’ve learned its better to make an attempt first and then show it. Handing someone a real draft and asking if it looks good or if I should add get a far more useful answer than describing the idea. The third is editorial judgment. Knowing when something has too much in it. I’ve built research documents, presentations and plans, and my instinct at the start was that more coverage meant more value. Some of the most useful revisions I have made were cutting a document in half or reducing a presentation down a couple slides. Deciding what to leave out has turned out to be harder than deciding what to include.
On the hard skills side, the clearest one is competitive research. Building out comparisons across a set of companies and actually turning that into something someone can make a decision from. I got a lot more comfortable in excel too, especially building models instead of lists. Taking followe counts or numbers off a page and getting an estimate you can actually argue with is a different skill than just organizing. I also picked up the basics of how referral and affiliate programs work. Commission structures, recurring versus one time payments, how tracking links and cookie windows work, and how a landing page gets built to actually convert someone instead of just explainging something to them. I learned to check who something is actually for too. One project I worked on turned out to be aimed at accountants, not regular users, and that changed the whole layout of my research.
The most recent hard skill has been researching automation. I designed a workflow that takes an article and turns it into social media posts using AI, with a person still having to approve it before anything goes out. Building that taught me what these tools are actually good at, but more importantly it taught me where they can’t be trusted.
For global competencies, the biggest one has been realizing how much of what I assumed was normal at work is really just normal where I’m from. I have spent a chunk of this internship researching how a company should localize its content by country and language, while also being the person who didn’t quite fit the local culture myself.