We don’t make coffee. Internship in Metapack

Internships are a great opportunity to confront knowledge with experience, but also to verify ideas about future work with reality. Our doors are always open for ambitious young people, and just like they learn from us – we also learn from them.

Internships in IT – necessary or not?

We are not able to count how many apprentices we hosted at our headquarters and online. However, we know one thing – each such meeting is a great opportunity for us to get to know better people who will soon become avpart of the labor market. We get a better idea of ​​their skills, areas of education, but also of their expectations related to their future work and career development. The cooperation of research centers with business is particularly valuable in this respect.

What can we offer to our interns?

• Knowledge and skills. We don’t use students to make us coffee or organize documents piling up in storages. On the contrary, each intern can count on reliable care and support, and above all – on the implementation of real tasks related to the activities of Metapack.
• Various areas of education. There are analysts, testers, developers, customer support and HR departments in our company. This means that we can offer practical knowledge acquisition in several business areas.
• A chance for employment. We clearly state that if an intern shows special commitment, we remember about him during recruitment. A short collaboration can therefore turn into a long-term work relationship, even before graduating from university.

Students in the hands of students

At Metapack, we have always put skill and commitment above experience over the years. Therefore, you might be surprised to find out that there are cases where apprentices are trained for the profession… by students employed at Metapack. It is perfectly normal for us. Moreover, we appreciate the benefits this brings.

There is a less formal relationship between the interns and their mentors. The gap between them, related to experience or developed forms of work, disappears. In addition, Metapackers gain a unique opportunity to organize their own knowledge and open up to new experiences – after all, as Seneca used to say: “By teaching others, we learn ourselves”. And teaching each other is an integral part of our daily work.

Internship at Metapack … in practice

To better illustrate this, let’s use an example. Meet our heroes, Emil and Paweł, who are currently developing their skills with us.

Emil came to us in the last weeks of vacation. He decided to contact Wiktor, our HR specialist, even though he was not entirely sure Metapack was looking for interns. However, the place for Emil was very quickly found in the demanding Customer Support department. What’s more, as soon as he started his internship, he received the position of Junior Customer Support Officer and became the first line contact with the client.

What are his duties and what skills does he develop? Here’s what he says:

“My tasks include, among other things, contact with clients, estimating the severity of the problem that the client reports, and transferring problems to the appropriate teams. The easiest way to ask what I’m doing would be to answer that I’m trying to understand what is going on here (laughs). This experience is mainly related to team work, communication with the team and the client. Soon I will also gain technical experience, strictly related to the system that Metapack offers to its customers.”

What is the biggest challenge for Emil at the moment?

“Certainly, practicing remotely. I can come to the office, but it’s empty at the moment. It’s easier to ask or explain something while sitting in the same room with that person.”

Paweł, our second apprentice, chose Metapack thanks to his participation in a project that our company is implementing in cooperation with the University of Zielona Góra. As he admitted:

“I liked the approach, commitment and atmosphere introduced by the company’s representatives.”

Paweł joined a completely different department, because during the internship he performed tasks related to analytics. What is he doing in Metapack?

“I mainly play with data, I export them, compare, analyze, transform, visualize, and on this basis I create reports. I get acquainted with technologies such as MS Excel, Power BI, Jira, but I also improve my analytical thinking ability.”

During the internship, Paweł has the opportunity to use the skills already acquired at the university. As he admits, his knowledge of Excel, Power Querry and creating pivot tables helps him in Metapack. Knowledge of SQL was also useful to learn JQL more easily.

What challenges does Paweł face during the internship?

“The hardest thing to remember is where to find specific data, which in turn raises other questions, for example, in what format to export it.”

No wonder, we process a lot of data every day. Mastering the ability to use them is one of the most forward-looking skills in the IT world and beyond.

Internships as seen by Metapackers

Of course, we also asked the mentors of Emil and Paweł about their opinions about the internship. The first of them learns under the supervision of Bartek, who evaluates the skills of his student very highly. What are his tasks? Bartek will surely describe them more technically:

“At First Line, Emil performs virtually all the duties associated with this position. He operates the support case, requests a new Number Range, creates cases and their triages. He also deals with the first analysis of tickets and alerts coming to Support.”

We know that such a wide spectrum of tasks is possible thanks to solid preparation at the university. We have been cooperating with the University of Zielona Góra for years and, as a business partner of the world of science, we constantly strive to deepen our relationship with the university. So we asked Bartek a difficult question about what areas of education would be worth extending to make it easier for young people to start their professional career:

“It is definitely important to conduct classes strictly related to relations in the IT world. For example, performing a task for a client as part of a project or even an entire object that not only theoretically but also practically could show what working in the Support department of an IT company looks like. “

Paweł’s mentor was Remigiusz, who admitted that for the first time he had the opportunity to prove himself in this role. As he claims, Paweł’s intelligence helps a lot, and the learning process is smooth and fast. What challenges did he prepare for Paweł?

“These are mainly tasks related to updating data from Excel files, as well as simple data analysis using both Excel, Power Querry or Power BI. Paweł also helps with the daily updates of the Jira system and CRMs used by the company.”