Realizing My True Skill Set

As I reach the midpoint of my internship, I’ve started reflecting on some of the lessons learned during these past few months. The first one being that I have a lot more to offer than I thought. I came into this internship worrying about how I could contribute to my new team given my skill set and past work experiences. While I understood that there would be a learning curve, the idea of tackling any unfamiliar work on my own (to some degree) was nerve-wracking. I think a lot of interns face this worry too. We spend years in school and work here and there when we can – but this doesn’t always guarantee that the skills we learn from past jobs are transferable.

What I’ve come to realize is that we pick up useful skills in all areas of our lives. From the attitude you bring to your work, to the way you engage with social media.

I’ve recently joined the Nepal Country team, where I’ve been supporting the partner with their communications strategy. The local partner needed someone who could help them create promotional materials, maintain their website and organize materials to be shared with sponsors i.e., annual reports.

I was excited for the opportunity to work on something so new, but when looking at my CV I worried about there being no communications experience. What I’ve come to realize is that even if I didn’t have formal communications experience, it didn’t necessarily mean I lacked the skills to carry out communications-like tasks.

One of the first tasks I worked on was redesigning and updating the organization’s brochures. Brochures are incredibly useful tools for raising an organization’s local awareness – particularly in areas that might not be able to access online communications. When creating these materials, it’s important to bear in mind information overload and distracting formats or designs. Keep them simple but striking so that the information gets across, but that it’s also appealing and fits the organization’s theme.

Once the message and theme are decided, it’s also important to know which tool you’ll use. In this case, my mind immediately went to Canva. I used the tool when organizing an event years ago and remembered how intuitive it was when designing promotional materials. I never used it outside of the classroom, but the tools it offered fit the task I needed to complete. After some back and forth with the local partner, we were able to finalize a design for our brochures!

This may not be a new or surprising moment for some, but for myself, being able to pull skills from past experiences was a reassurance that I was capable of completing any task set in front of me. I hope this encourages some of you to step outside of your comfort zone and ask for tasks you wouldn’t normally take on because you would be very surprised what skills pop up in your memory when you need them the most!