#feedbackfruits

[feedbackfruits]

[feedbackfruits]

[feedbackfruits]

Within the sales internship i'm working very close with CEO Ewoud de Kok and sales manager Jan Hein Gooszen. I learn(ed) a lot about sales strategy and presenting in the educational market. I love this agile team as I can easily approach a developer or someone from support to help providing me information or get to know more about our technical products.

Jur van de Beek, Business Development Intern @ FeedbackFruits (2016)

[feedbackfruits]

Internships at a Tech Start-Up

Why work at a start-up?

 Interning at a start-up comes with a number of benefits, but they all come down to one thing. It’s a huge learning opportunity. Most internships are, regardless of the position you occupy. However, it’s because of the ever-changing environment that a start-up belongs to, that it is a thing of its own. When you start your internship at a start-up, you constantly question yourself on whether what you’re doing is the most efficient way of doing things.

You’re in an environment where you will constantly come across terms you don’t know. You’ll realize that there are some things that might be beyond your area of expertise. In this environment though, you have the freedom to something about it. To learn and immediately utilize that knowledge in the best possible way.

When not to join a start-up 

If you don’t believe in the mission or vision that your organization is behind. Employers within start-up environments want a team that is as passionate about the goal as they are, if not more. They need a team that understands the problem that they’re trying to solve, and the solution they think would make a difference. It comes down to two things, 1) working at a start-up is hard, and 2) not everyone is cut out for it. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, the likelihood of you going out of your way to help the start-up succeed is minimal. A start-up, more than anything, needs individuals who are dedicated to making it succeed.

What to watch out for

Responsibility. When you say you’re going to do something, whatever assignment or task you take upon yourself, you need to do it. The work you put into your assignments correlates directly to how well it turns out. The more work you put in, the better it’ll be. 

Technology Start-Ups

Most start-ups these days belong to this category. Whether it’s because of a website or an app. However, when we say tech start-up, we’re referring to software start-ups. They are not that different from one another. The biggest difference being that software start-ups have a bigger and more diverse development team than most start-ups out there. Front-end, back-end, and artificial intelligence are just few examples of the various development teams that could be simultaneously working on the project.

They’re that much more fascinating due to this, because even though this may be the case, most of the other positions within a start-up are still open to people who may not be as technologically adept as one might expect. 

Responsibilities

Interning at a start-up will likely end up with you receiving projects that you may not exactly have the skills to do. In these scenarios there are a number of things you can do, but the most important one is being self-aware and realistically estimating to what extent you can do it yourself, and where you will need to ask for help. Start-ups look for a particular mindset when they consider people to fill in positions, namely the willingness to learn. Once you’re accepted as an intern, you’re not expected to be able to do everything. You take on an internship to learn, and start-ups give you the space to develop yourself – they just ask that you do it project-centered, meaning that you learn by applying what you learn to your work environment and making it a better place in general.