How Internships can Expose Young Adults to Unexpected Career Interests
An internship is not only a stepping-stone of experience before you get your first job, but it helps you figure out what career paths you like or dislike. For me, I always knew I wanted to do something in the marketing field. I love that the projects you work on are always timely and relevant based on what is going on in the world. I also love the flexibility to be creative with how you market to your audience.
As my time began with my internship at Skillsoft, I realized that I was going to be able to explore many different marketing disciplines. For example, marketing at Skillsoft includes digital, product, web design, content. Before I had started my internship, I never knew there were so many areas in this field! I was even more surprised as my internship went on throughout the summer that I was really interested in learning more about web design. Even though I never had any experience with web design I was really interested in learning more.
About halfway through this summer, I was tasked with posting blogs onto the Skillsoft site. I knew this was a big leap of faith I was given by the Director of Digital marketing because I was becoming the last set of eyes on the material, we were going to be publishing for the web world to see. I wasn’t going to take this new task lightly!
Once I got my credentials and a few lessons on how to post onto the site, it got me thinking- how is this site created? How is it that everything I am uploading doesn’t look the same as an administrator compared to the live blog? I began to do some research into my questions and asked one of my managers. Come to find out the way everything on the website comes together is from code. I was fascinated to understand that every website is built with a unique code and structure. I realized that I wanted to learn more about coding and started to ask if I could get lessons on how to write code and how I could help with the website design.
At first, I was so intimidated to look at HTML (a form of code), it is incredibly overwhelming and quite honestly looks like gibberish at first glance! My manager took this opportunity to explain to me in small chunks how to read the coded message. Simply put, html code is instructing your computer browser what you want to appear from start to finish.
The image below is an example of some small ways you write code! On the left-hand side, you can see the text in the black box (the administrators view before publishing); the wording in the box dictates how the right-hand side appears in preview on the website.
When writing code, you have to know that everything begins with brackets (< >), and whatever you are writing in the brackets has to be closed out (< / >) or else the entire text will appear like that. For example, in the code above, the top line reads,
- <h2> Heading </h2>
This is saying we want the text that says “Heading” in h2 format. So, we have to open the bracket, input the text we want, then close it out.
Not too bad right! If we keep going for the following lines,
- <p><strong> Bold text </strong></p>
New paragraph, start bold, “Bold text,” end bold, end paragraph
- <p><em> Italics </em></p>
New paragraph, start italics, “Italics,” end italics, end paragraph
- <ul><li> List view 1 </li><li> List view 2 </li><li> List view 3</li></ul><p></p>
Begin bulleted list, Bulleted list, “list view1”, end bullet, new bullet, “list view 2”, end bullet, new bullet, “list view 3”, end bullet, end bulleted list
When you break down the code into smaller sections like above, it is easier to understand the full picture! I never in a million years thought that I would be interested in code or learning more on website design. But having the opportunity to explore so many areas of marketing during this internship has allowed me to learn about a new field that I didn’t anticipate finding interesting. This internship gave me a lens into an entirely new skill that I didn’t know I would have ever found exciting and wanted to learn more about.
