Week 1: The One with the Welcoming

5/16 – 5/20

Welcome Week!

This week, I took my first steps as a Marketing Intern for Global Knowledge in Cary, NC. My week began with a wonderful and extensive tour of the Global Knowledge facilities. I was guided by my sweet supervisor, Wendy Magee. We explored the office space in the 9000 building and saw the sales, marketing, product, HR, and finance departments. We also visited every cubicle in the marketing department so that I could introduce myself to 30 or so of my new colleagues. We then visited the next-door training center where GK hosts its courses. This center is where GK products come to life and reach the consumers. Lastly, my supervisor organized a “Welcome to GK” lunch for me, so she and I, along with 8 other marketing employees, all got lunch together. All in all, it was a great first day!

My supervisor, Wendy, works for GK as their Marketing Projects Coordinator. Her job is to organize and carry out whatever operations projects the department needs to accomplish. This could mean she does work in purchase orders, surveys, collaboration, research, process improvement, etc. She is incredibly organized and oriented, and operates as a jack-of-all-trades. This is especially fortunate for me because serving as her intern will mean that I will get my hands on many different areas of marketing in the form of these projects.

My real work began on Tuesday. They wasted no time and I began working on Wendy’s projects immediately. My first task came from another employee, John Mark (social media manager). I gathered an extensive list of quotes for him to use in his “Wisdom Wednesday” campaign. And he used one the very next day! Next, Wendy and I needed to take care of a few survey incentive-winners. Before I came to GK, Wendy had forwarded two surveys, called Market Pulse and CTE, under the agreement that lottery winners would be chosen and those lucky few would receive $50 American Express gift cards. It was my job to email each of the winners and collect their name, phone number, and address for us to delivery the gift cards. In addition to those emails, Wendy and I needed to also visit the GK Shipping Center, also known as LSI. Brian over at LSI was in charge of these logistics, so we paid him a visit to get his approval to send these cards. It was great visiting the shipping center because I was able to see where all of GK’s memorabilia came from. I also left with a free t-shirt, hat, coffee mug, blue solo cup, some pens, and a notebook, all with GK’s logo on them!

On Wednesday, my next task began. I was asked to do some competitive intelligence research on three of Global Knowledge’s strongest competitors: CBT Nuggets, Pluralsight, and Lynda.com. For each one, I put together a document called a “battle card.” These battle cards are for internal sales use, and include basic company information of the competitor, inventory of the competitor’s features and amenities as compared to our own, and suggested answers to commonly asked comparison questions. So, I scoured the Internet for all of this information, and this is what occupied the majority of my workday. I also gathered more address from the incentive recipients.

The next day, I continued my competitor research. We also continued to collect the incentive recipients’ addresses. Wendy then allowed me to write the thank you emails to each of the incentive recipients for after they gave us their address.

Happy Friday! On this day, I finished my competitor research and sent the battle cards off to three sales managers. All in all, they asked for a few tweaks but they got good reviews! I was very glad to see that I was able to handle those on my own. Next, I was able to sit in on a meeting to discuss survey changes in the marketing department. Over the last decade, GK has drafted more than two hundred survey questions for virtually the same few topics. My supervisor was involved in a project to pare them down to three universal surveys. This meeting was for the finalization of the post-survey questions. I was also introduced to a new program called FootPrints that GK uses to track work request tickets to the Marcomm team. Any time someone needs a marketing tool built, reviewed, edited, etc it goes through FootPrints. And finally, every Friday at 11 am, my supervisor has a one-on-one meeting with Dave Knier, the Vice President of Marketing and my boss’ boss, that I was also invited to. We went through and discussed each ongoing project and he specifically asked for an update on what I was working on.

Overall, it was a great first week! I am looking forward to the rest of the summer.