This fall quarter, I applied for curricular practical training (CPT) in Denver to improve my experience and help me understand the courses I am registered in and my degree concentration. CPT is short for curricular practical training, and it is aimed to help international students get more experience which is related to their degree majors. After using CPT this quarter, I understand my course materials better.
I work at Performance Food Group (PFG) as an accounts payable project analyst. My internship requires me to promote and demonstrate a commitment to quality and timely deliverance of project milestones. I am also required to deal with multiple projects simultaneously with adherence to customer deliverables and related timelines. In addition, I need to clearly communicate both verbally and in written format with internal and external customers.
What’s more, I try to escalate any highly important internal or external communication to the department supervisor or manager. For example, I made some suggestions to our training document and communicated that with the manager, which was accepted for training new staff later. All my work is related to my degree which I pursue at University College. My internship helps me better understand courses materials and content that professors explained in class.
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During the course 4520, Principles of Finance for Organizations, students need to read a book named Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions which is helpful when people want to make improvements for their professional and personal life. To answer and discuss these questions with classmates in high quality, I need to combine my knowledge from both book and working experience. I share experience and examples from my work with classmates to make textual materials more “real”.
The first question Peter Drucker asks in his book is “What is our mission?” (Drucker 2015, 7) To answer this question, I need to make sure what our mission is. Our company has a definition of mission statement which is said, “We will be the innovative leader in providing customer satisfaction. In partnership with our customers, associates, vendors and sister companies, we will achieve mutually profitable growth. We will continue to operate with honesty and integrity as we support our partners and community.” (Makingafortune n.d.). To meet this mission, the company is separated into three sub-companies which are called Performance Foodservice, VISTAR, and PFG customized. Each sub-company will be responsible for its own tasks.
The second question Peter Drucker asks in his book is “Who is our customer?” (Drucker 2015, 19) To answer this question, I need to figure out both primary customers and supporting customers for the company. Determining who are our primary customers and supporting customers is important to a food distribution company. Primary customers may be different educational institutions, restaurants, supermarkets and so on. Supporting customers may be employees, contractors, members, communities and so on. Even among primary customers, our company builds a specific team to deal with transactions and problems for our VIP customers who play an important role in our daily operation and have the first priority.
We always want to meet VIP’s requirements efficiently and effectively. Therefore, determining primary customer can help our company increase revenue and keep growing without making unnecessary mistakes. PFG also effectively recruits and trains new employees and contractors to better and quickly adapt to work and environment, which may help new staff deal with issues efficiently and make primary customers satisfied in the future. Our company makes full use of purpose, mission and other information to determine our primary customers and supporting customers, thus we can finally achieve our targets.
To answer Drucker’s third question, I need to know what the customers value. As a food distribution company, it is important to know what our customers value and pay attention to that. I agree with the sentence in the book where it said, “The customer’s stake in the relationship is greater, as are the organization’s results” (Drucker 2015, 37). Our organization makes big profits from customers, so knowing what customer values are and making improvements will help our organization become more successful in the future. It is now a twenty-first-century world in which the relationship between organization and customers should be a win-win result.
The relationship also reflects the importance of Drucker’s third question in certain aspects. In our organization, we pay much attention to customers’ voice. We will put customers’ perspectives into our discussion and decisions. For example, after communicating with customers, we adjust our daily working schedule to make sure the prioritized task they valued will be dealt with in the morning every day. In the future, I encourage more surveys and feedback to be achieved from customers. Therefore, we can get more information and perspectives to make improvements which our customers want to see.
To answer Drucker’s fourth question, I need to know what our results are. This is an important question for every organization because every entity would like to know results and accomplishments it made. For our working team, we can get some direct results from replies of different operating companies. In this way, we know which approach is better and where we should make changes. For example, we always attach tracking PDF when we deal with drop ships to let operating companies know tracking details of products.
After a period of doing attachment, operating companies told us that drop ships were dealt with well and they would not require tracking documents any more. Therefore, our team changed the procedure in which we delete the step of making attachments, and finally the efficiency was improved. I also enjoy the sentence, “Values are designed to serve as individuals and organizations’ “true north”” (Drucker 2015, 56). This sentence highlights a direction or picture of using value. Different types of value will lead to different results. Sometimes, results are reflections of selection in values.
The fifth question Peter Drucker asks in his book is “What is our plan?” (Drucker 2015, 61) To answer this question, I need to figure out what our plan is. To understand the plan is very important to our company. Once the plan has any change, each single part might be affected, such as objectives, action steps, budget and appraisal. Both the company and employees need to treat plans correctly and carefully, because the plans are not only the techniques, but also the responsibilities. In addition, the degree of influence is decided mostly by the degree of changes.
For example, our company always has an employee team and a contractor team, and each team has its own plan which is required to be responsible for some assignments. Even though each team is separately assigned to work, they still need to cooperate or be reassigned work when it is needed. If one team has too much work to do, the plan of another team might be changed temporarily to help finish the current tasks first. Those kinds of changes might have different degree of influence which depends on the length and depth of changes for the plan. In the future, I recommend the management make big plans and small plans, which might help teams know the priority of tasks to finish. What’s more, those plans may help people figure out the most efficient order of tasks.
Another book that students are required to read is Financial Intelligence. After reading this book and think about my internship, I have some ideas about financial intelligence for both company and me. I am sure that I can become a better employee if I make use of my financial intelligence. Financial intelligence helps me understand the financial side of the organization, such as statements, ratios, WACC and working capital. All of these let me see my work in a big picture not only in my seat, which is usually people working together to achieve certain goals. Financial intelligence helps me see how I participate in our company’s operation. In addition, I know how to assess my performance using financial tools. In my opinion, more employees have access to financial intelligence, the better organization will be.
I think about financial literacy strategy that meetings across related departments and teams can be held more frequently than before. PFG doesn’t have enough meetings between related teams, which may cause lower quality in efficiency and shared information. If PFG can hold more meetings to share information across related departments and teams, we will know better what we can do to make sense for other teams and achieve common objectives together. Another financial literacy strategy is that the training files should be update during a time. Our current training files are not the latest one which makes new employees and contractors confused sometimes. My internship helps me make good use of course material in practical side, which make sense for me. In my opinion, course material is written to help readers improve themselves in the real world.
From the book, Financial Intelligence, I also learn about ethic problems and situations. I try to figure out the reason and condition for which ethical dilemma might take place. In my opinion, to be successful is important to both organizations and people. However, there are different definitions and approaches to be successful. The ethical standards will help me find directions before and during my decisions. From my perspective, everybody may treat ethical stands differently. I put ethical standards in a high priority because I need to feel “comfortable” during my decisions and actions, which helps me keep away from dilemma and struggle in my heart in the future. Sometimes, ethical standards may seem like fighting with financial intelligence and reducing earnings which you could “see”.
However, the combination of ethical standards and financial intelligence will show its power later during actions. I prefer to merge ethical standards and financial intelligence in my personal and professional lives. During making decisions in my personal life, I will keep asking myself if it is ethical to do things in that way or not. During my professional life, I would like to pay much attention to ethical standards among projects and choices. I try to avoid dilemmas in the future which may cause more problems and lead to a bad result. This option can be understood in another way that sharpening the knife will take some time but will not delay logging work. I will continuously remind myself about balance between ethical standards and financial intelligence during my personal and professional lives.
During the course 4100, Principles of Project Management, students need to work as groups to finish projects. Our group selects a project as hotel renovation which has little relationship to my real work. However, this class is trying to help students understand how to complete a project, not focusing on the exact working details. From the course, I know how to design a project and the correct orders of actions from the beginning to the end of a project. In addition, I learned how to use Microsoft Project to complete a project, which include different phases such as start, execution, finish and so on. The Microsoft Project let me see the whole picture of the project and influence of each change.
Usually, people may ignore the initiation part of project which is very important for project team members to keep operating project efficiently and effectively. My internship requires new employees and contractors that they should have idea of mission and goal of company. Then, new staff will get training and instruction about their work. When staff are assigned tasks, they need to follow some orders to finish tasks correctly and quickly. These requirements have the same core idea with projects which require formation and basic documents first and all the actions are required by exact orders later.
Fall 2018 is my first quarter for pursuing my degree at University College. Even if I haven’t touched the core information of project management, my internship helps me understand course materials in a valuable and meaningful way. Sometimes, the course materials seem difficult to understand by myself, but I could make it easier to digest when I put material information into my real-world work. I believe that making use of internship to help students become successful at college is one of the goals of internship course.
In conclusion, my internship experience helps me understand my course materials in a realistic and professional way. I also make use of my internship experience to take part in discussion both in class and online, which makes me feel myself valuable that I could share something meaningful with others. The internship experience helps me complete my courses better, which lets me not become an armchair strategist, but a person who think about project strategies in a real world.
