Lauren Henderson
"It's fine to celebrate success but it's more important to heed the lessons of failure." - Bill Gates
Switching gears from the sports industry to Corporate America, Cottingham & Butler tested my creativity and improved my professional development through a 40-hour workweek for ten weeks. I learned basic level insurance and focused primarily on two projects, one involving design and the other with research. Below, there is more in-depth information on the two main projects I was assigned during my time with C&B.
Upon my final week as an intern, I was offered a part-time position to help the communication team during their busy season. During my time as a part-time employee, I learned more about Microsoft Word and began working with account teams and clients.
Topic Templates
Project 1
I was a client management intern on the communication team and the first project I was assigned included designing Topic Templates. Topic Templates are one-page, informational flyers about specific insurance topics or monthly health and wellness topics. I had to research the information and understand the language as well as design each individual template. Each template took about 5 hours and over the course of the internship, I created a total of 19 templates.
I used a website called ZyWave to learn the insurance language as well as look at some other designs of templates. I also looked at a SmartSheet survey that gave the communication team direct feedback of what clients were wanting and lastly, I had to learn how to design using Microsoft Word, which was a learning curve for me.
Employee Advocacy App Research
Project 2
While I was designing topic templates, I was also researching the various employee advocacy apps that are in the marketplace right now. These advocacy apps are mainly used to show an employee the benefits they have through their employer. The communication team didn't have the knowledge of these apps so I researched three main apps and compared all different functions that I could.
Through this experience, I learned more about Excel, as I created two comparison charts on the apps, I also refined my research tools. I had to look at multiple different websites, various locations and had to contact representatives of each app to get more information, that may have not been released yet.
**These are not flyers I produced, just flyers that resemble the work I did at C&B.
