My name's Ambar Vizcarrondo, and this is my #WhatILearned story.
I was born and raised here in Orlando, Florida after my parents moved here from Puerto Rico. I attended Valencia College and went on to transfer to Rollins College's Hamilton Holt School where I majored in Environmental Studies & Sustainable Urbanism. I came back to Valencia just recently to switch career paths to Office Administration, and it was here — in the Spring — that I signed up for a summer internship with Isabella. We immediately clicked and I was brought on to be the Human Resources intern for Pivot Business Consulting.
I wasn’t quite sure what kind of work I would be doing or what kind of skills I would gain, but I'm glad I decided to do this internship because I learned about project management, training and development, and recruiting among other skills.
Project management's the most amazing skill I learned here at Pivot. After becoming an Asana Brand Ambassador, I quickly fell in love with using the project management software app to keep track of things I needed to do, needed Isabella to do, and needed my fellow interns to do. Asana really made my internship life much easier to handle. I even found myself using it for my own personal tasks outside of work and school. In Asana, you not only assign tasks to yourself and others, but you can also create templates of projects, which is exactly what I found myself doing. I created multiple projects using Asana. The main one I created was the Pivot Recruiting & HR Template that facilitates the recruiting, pre-on boarding, on boarding, and exiting process. It allows Isabella to keep track of what she needs to do, and she in turn is able to assign a copy of the template to the interns in order to mark off the tasks prior to beginning the internship and when it’s coming to an end. Creating templates also made my life easier when I was training the interns.
Training and development are two skills I picked up really quickly, and I became comfortable utilizing even quicker. At first, Isabella had me do one on one meetings to walk the interns through the company’s Goal Planning Worksheet and how to find and fill out the timesheet. After doing three meetings I realized that teaching people how to use these documents was a great skill for me to showcase to my future employers because it taught me that I've a lot more patience than I originally perceived--and don’t mind doing something over and over. It also made me wonder: what would be a better way to accomplish this in a more efficient manner where the intern could go at their own pace? That was when Isabella told me to create a document that would be later turned into a training video for future interns. I'm so glad I did because the how-to documents have been used by me since then to send out to new interns so they can work on the HR documents.
Throughout my time at Pivot Business Consulting, recruitment of new interns was always a priority. The recruiting process is a wonderful skill that I learned. I saw just how much work goes into it: starting from making job descriptions, post them onto job boards, acquiring applications of possible new recruits, contacting those recruits and setting up interviews, going to job fairs, and so much more. I noticed the recruiting process is very thorough and dynamic, requiring a lot of attention and management, so I’m very happy that I got to learn some of what human resource officers do when they work in the field of recruiting.