School desks or the real world? These are 4 things you learn on an internship that you miss at school.
Over the past few months, I did an internship at Blyde Benelux in Amsterdam. During my studies, I learned a lot about the communication profession. At school, you learn theories, make plans for fictional companies, and teachers are always ready to help. When I started my internship at Blyde Benelux, I noticed that the practice works differently. Especially at a B Corp like Blyde, where you work for sustainable missions and real impact. What do you do when a journalist stops responding? Or if a customer changes their mind halfway? These are the four biggest lessons I learned in the workplace and not in the lecture hall.
Lesson 1: You learn independence by yourself here
At school, you often work in project groups. Everyone is in the same boat and if you want to chat or have a question, there is always time. At an agency like Blyde, all colleagues have their own tasks and a full agenda. As a result, I learned very quickly to be independent. You can't stand at your colleague's desk for everything. You learn to choose your moments, bundle questions and, above all, try to solve it yourself first. Scary at first, but in the end, it gives a huge thrill when it works.
Lesson 2: Forget your personas - people are unpredictable
During college classes, I was told twenty times: “make a stakeholder persona: Henk, 45 years old, cares about sustainability”. In real life, stakeholders (such as journalists, customers and partners) are flesh and blood people. And spoiler: Not all of them are as the Canva template suggests. Journalists have deadlines and their own agendas and aren't always waiting for your pitch email, no matter how well they fit your “persona”. Customers, but also colleagues, can change their mind while you're already implementing it. At Blyde, I learned how to deal with that dynamic by not planning the whole day, for example. Every day, I set aside one hour in my agenda for unexpected questions and urgent tasks. This flexibility is crucial in the fast-paced PR world.
Lesson 3: Executing a strategy is different than writing a plan
Writing a communication plan for a grade is safe. You hand it in, get feedback, and you're done. But at Blyde, I was allowed to help roll out a new content strategy - and that's only when it starts. In practice, something always goes differently than planned: colleagues who disagree, messages that are not ready on time, priorities that shift. At school, you learn to make the plan, where I sometimes just learned to let go of the plan and take a different path to achieve the goal. For example, halfway through my internship assignment, I found out that I needed to adjust the content strategy to better meet the needs of colleagues. The most important lesson from this? Sometimes you have to start over, take a different path: and that's okay. The field of work is dynamic and sometimes unpredictable, but that ultimately makes the result consistent and valuable.
Lesson 4: Learn to switch between different interlocutors
At school, there is a clear line: you and the teacher. In fact, you only communicate with one type of 'stakeholder' who is mainly there to help you succeed. In an organization like Blyde, you communicate with different layers and interests: interns, colleagues, critical journalists and customers. I had to learn that each group requires a different approach. Where you can talk informally to a fellow intern about your assignments for the week, a customer or colleague asks for a professional, solution-oriented attitude, even when things go wrong. Switching between those different levels is a skill that you only really develop in the workplace.
Conclusion: One thing is not better than the other: my studies are the perfect basis. My internship at Blyde Benelux brought that theory to life. Both are indispensable. The school desks gave me the knowledge, but the past few months have taught me how to use that knowledge in an environment that is constantly changing. The pace, how to deal with real people and responsibility are lessons that I will take with me for the rest of my professional career.
