Networking, career fairs, assessing wants for your career, looking for a company that will support your growth and make you feel fulfilled – I remember all of those anxious feelings and thoughts floating around in my head when I was searching for internships. There were two things that I knew I wanted to do for sure. The first was to secure an internship at a SAAS company, and the second was to find a company that had a truly great company culture. Through research on Linkedin and networking with friends in my student organizations at the University of Houston like MISSO and HBSA, I found HCSS.
In the early Spring of 2019, HCSS invited my student organization for a campus tour where I learned about this amazing company and met some of the really great people who worked here. That day I felt like I struck gold because HCSS fit everything I was searching for. It is a company that is not only for its customers, but also its employees! I went home that night and applied to be an Education Services Intern. Coincidentally, when I interviewed for the position, some of my potential team members were those I met and talked with on the day I went to the campus tour!
I then started in April of 2019 as an Education Services Intern. The Education Services department is responsible for the services and resources available to customers to learn about HCSS software. In this position, I was going to have the opportunity to create and edit training videos, build learning material and courses that taught our customers how to best utilize our software products. I also learned the backend of our Learning Management System called the “HCSS Academy” where all the edited videos and courses are hosted for both internal and external use. In the summer, I learned how to coordinate our in-person training sessions and lead a call campaign to the Universities around the nation that utilized our HeavyBid Estimating software in their curriculums and competitions. My team had a lot of faith in me and strongly encouraged me to grow and try different areas of our department, so in the later part of my internship, I took over much bigger responsibilities like managing our HeavyBid 101 and 201 training events that generated direct revenue for our department, developed massive reports from data collected on excel that was later presented to our Executive team, making UI changes to the HTML & CSS of our custom HCSS Academy pages, and bigger creative projects like building out software simulations and interactive learning material.
During my internship I found the niche of what I truly loved to do. I discovered that I really enjoyed the educational side to software in the technology Industry and knew that this was what I wanted to pursue full-time at HCSS. HCSS is a unique place to work, and I loved how centered it is on making the employee experience unbeatable. They care about our health and the campus is set up for use in each part of the facility during the day. I made sure that I did the best in successfully executing every project I was assigned, frequently met with my team members and manager, and even pushed some of my different unused skills onto new projects to show my initiative.
When it came time to make a decision on a full-time offer, I knew HCSS was the place for me and was my top choice. After a year and a half of being an Education Services Intern, I became a full-time employee and changed my title to Learning Experience Specialist. As a Management Information System major, our skills are not only technical but also creative, and I feel that I found the perfect place where I could actively utilize those skills and develop even better ones. It has been about 5 months since my initial start date, and I am already developing so much. For those who are still looking for internship opportunities and want to secure full time positions, show your drive, become irreplaceable in whatever you do, ask questions and put yourself out there. Those were the biggest things that helped me on my journey.