Immersive Learning
What Life Is Like As An Intern At A Startup
Forget expectations, this is a learning experience like no other.
‘Milk?’
‘Two sugars?’
This is the typical question many interns will be all too familiar with asking on a Monday morning,
Not me.
I’m yet to actually make a coffee, but that's because I try to avoid caffeine after 10am.
I digress.
I am an Intern at chronyko, a small startup that creates and delivers Immersive Learning experiences for a variety of clients. These range from shorter activities lasting a couple of hours up to large scale, multi-day events.
What is Immersive Learning I hear you ask?
Immersive Learning is the use of immersive techniques, including storytelling, theatrical performance, technology and puzzles to develop and exercise skills.
We will sit down, listen to clients, discuss what they want to achieve and the outcomes that they want to meet. From this, we can provide an immersive experience that is best suited to their specific requirements and delivers learning benefits far greater than that of traditional learning and development methods. Our core four key skill areas that we focus our activities around are communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.
My role within chronyko
My official role is ‘Marketing Intern’ with the responsibilities initially being advertised as ‘assisting with business development and marketing projects driven by the operating environment’.
One thing you quickly learn when working at a startup is that your job description is more of a preliminary guide, rather than a definitive blueprint to the only tasks you will be undertaking.
If there is an area you want to learn about, or you have a skill you want to pursue, you will be supported in this endeavour. If there is any area you’re curious about, you need only ask. Similarly, if there are aspects that don’t pique your interest then you aren’t forced into trying it.
You get to see the role each individual plays within the team and how they get involved in a plethora of business aspects, collaborating and playing to their strengths to produce an awesome end result.
On a personal level, I have been provided with the freedom to explore and this is but one of the many beautiful elements of working within a small team.
The idea
We operate within a fairly niche industry, providing a service that is not offered by many other businesses. One of the biggest struggles we face is being able to inform and educate organisations of the value that Immersive Learning can bring in both the short and long term.
Therefore the challenge I was tasked with, along with fellow intern Ben, was to come up with a way to market our services in a way that is creative, innovative and perfectly encapsulates what it is we do at chronyko.
This is by no means easy but surrounded by a team of confessed problem solvers we were ready to rise to the challenge.
The project that we decided on for the duration of my three months here, was the concept creation, planning, prototyping, sourcing and eventual delivery of an immersive puzzle box to be sent out to a selection of Learning and Development individuals.
These were people who were responsible for the L&D of teams at major companies located within the UK. We wanted to target companies with similar values to ourselves; forward-thinking, innovative leaders in their respective industries.
The reality
There were several criteria that we had to achieve such as making sure it fits within medium parcel postage requirements, takes 10–15 minutes to complete and is easy to reset. However, the most challenging element was to come up with a series of puzzles from scratch that intertwine with a storyline, all with absolutely no personal experience in puzzle creation or storytelling. How hard could it be?
To begin, we were given free rein of the offices’ abundant resources of puzzles and challenges. This was all in the name of market research but mainly aimed at fuelling our inspiration and getting our creative juices firing. This certainly helped to understand what currently exists, what works well and what elements didn’t quite gel.
After planning our storyline and the theme it would follow, we set out on coming up with as many ideas as we could, based on a concoction of puzzles we tried, challenges we had read about online and just sheer imagination.
We were told from the offset that no idea was too weird or whacky and that often the best ideas come from variations of these odd initial concepts, after some tweaking and adjustment.
This freedom gave us the safe space we needed to go down as many rabbit holes as necessary in pursuit of the perfect puzzle.
One puzzle idea did occupy a large portion of our time and after a frustrating number of attempts to bring the concept to life, we had to let the idea depart from the realms of possibility. This is a puzzle that could still appear in the future though, never say never.
Eventually, we were able to finalise the box and its contents, sourcing tailor-made elements from near (Reading) and far (Poland). It all came together as planned and it was incredibly rewarding to complete the internship with a physical product to show and an awesome advertisement for the business.
So what did we learn?
Although puzzles may seem simple once you’ve struggled to work them out, coming up with that concept in the first place, ensuring it fits within your budget and links in with a storyline is a big challenge in itself.
For us, we were able to learn straight from the offset by having the opportunity to take part in some of the Immersive Learning activities previously developed at chronyko. This was a great way to understand both the services chronyko provide, as well as fully getting to grips with how immersive experiences work and how they differentiate from traditional learning methods.
Now whilst the exposure to all of these different challenges may have felt slightly overwhelming at the time, I think it was actually the best way to learn. We got an insight into what makes puzzles work and similarly what may not work so well. We could then take this knowledge and apply it to the puzzles that we eventually created.
The whole experience, however, taught me that marketing is broad and that clearly, a one size fits all approach does not work for every business. Especially at a startup, marketing has to reflect both a company’s values and it’s offerings in the best possible light.
Marketing is a flexible construct that must be individually moulded to each organisation to make sure that it is effective as possible.
As a whole, the process of being able to create a product from scratch has been a huge learning curve and the experience I am sure will prove invaluable as I progress with my career.
But the experience of being able to intern at a startup is something I would recommend to any young person at the beginning of their career, who finds themselves with a similar opportunity. You will be required to hit the ground running from your first day, be exposed to far more business aspects than you are likely to at a large corporation and will learn more than you could possibly imagine.
Mathew Rainbow is passionate about the designing, building and delivering of Immersive Learning experiences for skills development, as part of the team at chronyko. For more information about Immersive Learning, head over to the Immersive Learning publication.
