by Jens Fischer, Flash Developer,
firstbornA creative company can be compared to a sports team on many levels. If you look at soccer in Europe for example, you will notice that some of the most successful teams are pouring money down the drain to keep up their success, while some of the teams that are competing with them at the highest level, are being run on a shoestring in comparison.
This phenomenon shows that the key to long term success is not primarily to spend money to buy stars off the market, but rather motivation and youth development work to create and forge your own talent. Here at firstborn, we pride ourselves in our internship program for this exact reason.
Talent alone is not enoughOne motto of our company is that “we want people here, who want to be here”. If a sports team buys a skilled player who will leave at the first sign of hard times or the first tempting offer from somewhere else, they won’t do your team much good in the long run.
If you identify with your team and fight for the whole idea of it instead of purely your own personal gain, you’ll always push yourself to the next level.
I started at firstborn as an intern in 2006, while I was still studying “Interactive Media” in Germany. The way I approached my search for an internship was to aim for my dreams and only sent a few applications out to the companies that were (and still are) my absolute favorite web design outfits in the world.
Since I had been visiting it regularly back then already, the FWA turned out to be my main tool to pick the companies I was interested in and whose work I could identify with. One of them was Firstborn and I was extremely proud and motivated to find out that I had the chance to become a part of what I thought was one of the best teams out there.
After accepting me into their internship program, they helped me out a lot with getting everything together for my visa and put me in contact with one of their current interns back then, who was from France and answered many of my questions about life in New York as a foreign intern.
I immediately had the feeling of being welcomed into a big family, which made me want to prove my worth to them even more. Looking back at that time now, I have to admit that when I started I probably wasn’t the most skilled intern of all time, but I think I can safely say that my motivation and work ethic made me extremely valuable to the team.
Having a mentorFrom my own experience I can say that the most efficient way to improve your skills is to work closely with a more skilled and more experienced person and then add your own personality and style to what you’re learning.
A good sports team will usually have a well balanced mix of older, experienced players as well as younger talents. The later often bring the drive, the passion and the pure will to fight and win into the team, while the more experienced players are able to lead the team with their experience, teach them the tricks that have proven to be effective and guide that somewhat uncontrolled power of the youngsters in the right direction.
That is why the truly great characters in sport always improve the whole team around them and make every single player look better than you would have them expected to be.
During their internship at Firstborn, trainees work very closely with mentors, who are senior employees in the intern’s particular field of interest and responsible for the trainees’ work and progress. In my own case, my Flash development mentor back then was working on a big website and she would assign smaller parts of that project to me and oversee my work.
As interns learn from senior members and prove their skills, they will be trusted with more responsibility and eventually get to manage their own little projects. Today I see that the teacher/student relationship works both ways though, because you can’t teach what you didn’t master yourself.
The role of a mentor forces the senior employees to constantly cover their groundwork and improve their own game. The interns will ask you questions that you haven’t thought about for a while and they will always bring a fresh perspective to the table that helps you reflect on your own methods.
In addition to that, an extremely motivated apprentice is something that can in return motivate the mentor to always go the extra mile.
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Source: www.thefwa.com
