April is National Internship Awareness Month, and here at Sierra we’re always supporting the next generation of the working force by hiring on interns. In the past, we’ve hired interns to assist our engineering, development, sales, marketing, design, and business teams.
Internships are a great way to offer training in practical, real-world situations. Education is great, but nothing beats experience from getting out there in the field and working on real projects with real customers. In fact, we often offer full-time positions to hard-working interns after the completion of their internships.
That being said, below are some of the stories of “interns turned employees” that are currently working on the Sierra team.
Savannah Guidi, Marketing & Creative Lead
What was your intern title?
Creative Designer
What were your duties as an intern?
I created and designed graphics to be used in digital and print marketing materials for utilization by the sales and marketing teams. Also, I assisted the team with web design as needed (mainly on WordPress).
What do you do differently, or additionally, now as a full-time employee?
Since then, I’ve taken over design initiatives entirely, as well as all marketing efforts. Now I create the designs, write the supplemental marketing content, and setup/execute the content both digitally and through printing methods. Also, I can be found planning events/sponsorships, managing social media accounts, executing email marketing campaigns, generating leads, and many other marketing-related tasks. Lastly, I’m the head designer on all internal websites, as well as customer web design projects.
What school did you attend?
I attend Robert Morris University for a year where I completed coursework in Media Arts. After that year, I transferred and was in the last graduating class of Pittsburgh Technical Institute (now re-branded as Pittsburgh Technical College). I received my Associate Degree in Graphic Design in 2016.
Jacob Russell, Application Developer
What was your intern title?
Junior Application Developer
What were your duties as an intern?
I mostly worked on our internal ticketing system, SIM (Sierra Incident Manager), by assisting the other team members with its development as needed.
What do you do differently, or additionally, now as a full-time employee?
As an employee, I am now working on a multitude of projects both internally and for customers. Not to mention, my knowledge of coding languages has increased from about 1 or 2 to nearly a dozen.
What school did you attend?
I attended Pittsburgh Technical College where I received my Associate Degree in Computer Programming.
As you can see, Sierra has a close-knit relationship with Pittsburgh Technical College where we often find our interns. This has much to do with our management team being on the Advisory Board at PTC for the Information Technology, Network Administration program, as well as the close proximity of the college (only three and half miles!)
However, we don’t only accept interns from PTC. In the past, we’ve had interns (some turned employees) from schools such as California University of Pennsylvania and Youngstown State University. That being said, if you’re interested in an internship with Sierra, feel free to send your resume to jobs@sierr001-2.sierradevops.com for future consideration.
Currently, we’re excited to be taking on three new interns this spring. These fresh faces will be assisting with Tier-1 IT support, junior development duties, and sales/business administration tasks.
We hope you’ll celebrate this month by considering taking on an intern within your organization. Even if you don’t have room to hire on after the fact, you’ll be giving them valuable experience to take with them as they venture out into the professional world.
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Sierra Experts is an IT Managed Service and Support provider, specializing in IT Monitoring and Management, Cloud/Virtual Systems, Hosting, VoIP/SIP PBX Trunks and Solutions, Physical Server Hosting, Website Design and Development, Software Development, and Hardware and Software reselling. For more, check out sierr001-2.sierradevops.com
