Learnable ’20 — What to Expect
Hey, you super amazing person reading this article, it is already too late to say happy new year, so I’ll stick to wishing you a happy new month. 2020 is already looking good for us here at Genesys. We have spent the first month of it making a lot of plans and setting a lot of goals. I’m going to be telling you about the Genesys Internship Program — Codename: Learnable, what has changed, what we have planned, and how we intend to deliver it. I think it will be worthy to note that unlike what I said here in the past, I am no longer the “Internship Program Designer General.” I am very fortunate to be working with the most amazing people right now, so you can imagine how amazing this year’s internship program is going to be. Jerry Uke and Eliezer Ajah have worked tirelessly to build on some of the things I’d done in the past, and I’m very proud of them. You will eventually come to understand the saying, “Two heads are better than one.” — Or 3 heads in this case. 3 good heads!
The Genesys Internship Program — Codename: Learnable is a 6-month training program for undergraduates and fresh graduates that focuses on software development and product design. Through this program, we are building the next generation of superheroes in the tech industry. Beyond learning to code software and design products, we also help these youngins learn soft skills that will propel them to great heights throughout their careers. In the past, we have had people that showed up with barely any knowledge, graduating with enough technical know-how to land their first job in just one month. This is a testament to our very unusual learning approach and the firm belief in our mantra, “Everything Is Learnable.”
Did Someone Say Virtual?
Yes, I said it! All thanks to Jerry, we are finally going virtual. Every year, we get a massive number of applications and end up just taking 2 percent of the people that applied. Imagine the number of people we could affect if we made this program more accessible by taking it online. Those were the thoughts running through my mind when I had my first meeting with Jerry to discuss the possibility of running a virtual internship program. After our conversation, Jerry came up with our virtualization strategy that would use a mix of slack and moodle to deliver the learning content and activities without compromising the quality of the outcomes. He also came up with brilliant ideas like a virtual mentorship program and the virtual build season. The point is this; You can get the full learnable experience from anywhere in the world. — Yeah, I said it! Anywhere in the world!
We are already in talks with our past interns that now work in various companies to mentor this present generation of interns. They will work with the interns, under the supervision of the Learning & Development team, to set goals and meet all the expectations of this internship. We consider the virtual internship to be as important as the physical internship, and to this end, we have created an elimination system. Virtual interns will start from ground zero and move up stages by completing tasks and achieving learning outcomes. Only the people that share our values of passion, excellence, candor, and collaboration will be able to make it to the end.
The Minority Report
We created the Minority Report to ensure that the Genesys Internship Program — Codename: Learnable produces individuals that are versatile and dynamic. It creates an avenue for interns to display multidirectional intelligence by carrying out non-academic tasks in teams. This reaffirms our commitment to ensuring that the program doesn’t end up as a mere academic exercise. The minority report is one of my favorite parts of the program. The interns work together on various tasks centered around creative thinking and problem-solving.
Credo Congress
Credo Congress is our way of having open discussions about beliefs, worldviews, and individual philosophies. It is common knowledge that there are a lot of prevalent social issues in today’s world, with a lot of people on both sides of the divide. These social issues include gender roles, racial profiling, individualism, politics, pro-life versus pro-choice arguments, and imperialism, amongst others. Credo Congress provides an avenue for people to understand others and equally be understood. It lets us share perspectives and gain a multifaceted understanding of whatever issues are discussed. We decide on a topic and do some research, which in turn drives the conversations.
Learnable Business Sessions — LBS
Here, we are going to play startups, founders, and co-founders. LBS introduces us to the world of business and how to meander its interstices. The interns will learn how to do market research, manage projects, maximize profits, and acquire customers by running a mock startup for 3 weeks. This part of the program basically teaches the interns how to run a company. It also serves as a preparatory session for the Build Season, which essentially lets the interns apply the technical, business, and soft skills they have acquired to develop a product.
Scrum Week with Idowu Akinde
Scrum is an agile software development framework that aims to deliver value to customers in routine iterations called sprints. It helps software development teams build and deliver software in little bits. At Genesys, we value agile and scrum as it helps us respond to change in a highly volatile, uncertain, and dynamic industry. We spend a whole week with Idowu Akinde learning the basics of scrum and agile. Scrum is fast becoming a standard in the software development industry, and we are making sure that our interns meet up to those standards.
Build Season
Enter the Build Season. The Build Season is the climax of the internship program. If it were in an opera, it would be the crescendo. We apply everything we have learnt; coding, design, business, technical writing, product development, and management, etc. The endpoint is an industry-standard product to be presented on Demo Day! Remember, we said Learnable is not an academic exercise, and we meant it. Build Season is usually fun, exciting, and at the same time, very tasking. You can tell by the late nights at the office and the unusually buzzy air around the office at this time. Interns all over the corridors are looking for help from their technical mentors, sticky notes all over the glass walls in the workspace, pens, markers, and paper sketches. It is what I would term a phantasmagoria of colors and bright lights.
Prom
After build season and demo day, we wrap up the internship program with our prom and award night. Have you ever seen nerds in tuxedoes and beautiful dinner gowns? This is what prom night is. We eat, drink, make merry, and reward the outstanding performers. People say their goodbyes and shed some tears.
This article will not permit me to exhaust all the amazing things we have planned for y’all, but trust me when I tell you that you are about to witness the best internship program ever — I can bet my money on that. If you have applied, please stay close to your email till you hear from us, and if you haven’t applied, now is a good time to. Head over to learnable.genesystechhub.com to apply now.
