Former Customer Support Interns Find Successful Careers
Yesterday, I introduced you to Ag Leader’s current customer support interns and talked about the customer support internship experience. To go along with this, I thought it would be interesting to ask a few of our former customer support interns about their experiences with the internship and how it has helped them get to where they are today.
Everyone I spoke with was excited to tell me about how valuable their internship experience was. I had the opportunity to speak with former interns who still work for Ag Leader, as well as a former intern who is now an Ag Leader dealer. Below is what they had to say. Aaron Friedlein currently works for Ag Leader as the SMS Product Manager, and he started as a customer support intern in 2001. He worked part-time through school and then took a full-time job with Ag Leader upon graduation. (Some of you may recognize Aaron, as he is also a regular blog author.)
Aaron told me his internship experience exposed him to many different farming practices, and he learned how those different practices sometimes need different tools or information. Aaron also credits his internship with helping him develop critical thinking skills. Using this ability to view a problem from many different perspectives is very useful when enhancing or adding software features.
Currently an International Sales Manager for Ag Leader, Nick Ohrtman started as an intern in 2005 and has worked here ever since. (Nick also posts on Precision Point.) Nick says his experiences as a technical support intern were very valuable as well, and he said two main things came to mind in regards to the skills he learned. The first was his customer service skills; his experiences working with different types of customers over the phone have been very beneficial in his current job. In addition, the in-depth knowledge of agriculture equipment he gained in his internship has proven very helpful.
When working with foreign equipment, he often thinks back to how he had to break down a system and figure out how to adapt it while working in the technical support department. Adam Gittins worked for Ag Leader as an intern in 2001 and then worked both part-time and then full-time in tech support. In 2005, he took a job with Heartland Technology Solutions, an Ag Leader Dealership in Harlan IA.
Adam says his internship helped prepare him for a full-time career in precision agriculture and was a good base on which to build his career. He said the knowledge and confidence he gained while taking phone calls and being the person customers looked to for help solving problems has proven to be very valuable as an Ag Leader dealer. One of the main goals of our customer support internship program is to provide interns with the skills and precision ag knowledge to benefit them in the future, and it's great to see how some past interns have use those skills to further their careers. We are confident that our current and future interns will see success in their career pursuits as well!