Quote to Class: A Peek Inside ATG’s Internship Program
T he transition from backpack to briefcase can be a jarring one, especially for students going into the tech industry. That’s why at ATG, we have developed internship programs to give young professionals all the tools they need to succeed.
We initially found our four college interns in November through various networking events, and over the following summer, they completed a three-month program that guided students through Quote to Cash and the ATG Monetization Ecosystem™. Among other smaller projects, each intern was assigned a mentor and placed on a client project, giving them hands-on experience with specific task and project roles.
But the interns didn’t just learn about ATG-specific work; professional development was a large component as well.
“It’s interesting because often people come in to ATG thinking they are only going to learn how to configure software, but there is so much more that comes with that,” said Logan Ganieany. “I became a lot more proficient in Microsoft Office…Trello, Salesforce Classic and CPQ, Skype for business, GotoMeeting, Salesforce1, and many other ATG internal tools used for business analyst and project manager roles.”
Carlin Anderson added some of the soft skills the internship emphasized, ones that can be useful in any job:
“The ATG internship forces you to get out of your comfort zone and will teach you how to deal with task ambiguity,” he said. “Many people may find this uncomfortable, but in real consulting work, and in so many other business professions, this is a very real challenge that you will come across. Learning how to deal with this in a relatively safe environment, such as this internship, may be one of the best and most educational professional experiences.”
Our college interns were also able to develop leadership skills through mentoring another group of students: our high school interns.
The high school program was focused largely on becoming familiar with the industry, particularly through learning terminology and exploring Salesforce. The four interns also completed a large project in which they created a subscription-based billing process. The high school internship program also gave students a head-start in creating their professional presence by taking them through the process of creating a LinkedIn profile. All of this took place over the course of only four weeks.
The biggest success that we saw out of this is at all four interns were female, and they now share a new passion for technology and have the desire to further explore that in their future. Demystifying tech was an awesome success that we didn’t even think of until after the internship had concluded.
Jay Allen is the Marketing Director at ATG and has been with the company since 2013. His role often takes him on the road to talk about ATG and the work they do. He recently surpassed 500,000 miles on his Greyhound Mileage Plus account and looks forward to visiting Mississippi one day.
