Monday, July 25, 2016

Intern Words of Wisdom - by Shae

I am currently in awe that my internship is more than half way over. I have been bouncing to many different agencies, learning all I can about the business process and the leadership. Thankfully everyone in the different agencies is excited to have us working on projects for them! Payton and I sat in with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for two wonderful weeks. We spent the first few days meeting all the department heads. During the meetings, we learned about their path to state government and their general day-to-day activities. This was very helpful as we were given the project of renaming their departments to better represent their business practices. Additionally, the goal of the project was to ensure that everyone was listed in the correct department within our HRIS system. In order to make sure our information was correct, we met with the chief operating officer, controller, compensation consultant, and chief of staff. As you can imagine, these were great contacts to make within the state. A few of them even offered to be a reference for me in the future. It was a pleasure to work for them and learn from such influential movers and shakers. We ended the two weeks with the completion of three separate and equally meaningful projects. Also, we got a sneak peek into the two final designs for the new license plate design! You can vote on your favorite design at the Indiana State Fair!

During that week, I also had the pleasure of meeting with Governor Mike Pence in his office for a speech from himself to all the 2016 Governor’s Summer Interns. He spoke of all the different paintings hanging around the Governor’s office, one of which is a last original painting of President Abraham Lincoln before his assassination. Governor Pence then went on to do a Q&A session for the remainder of the meeting. It was an honor to sit in front of the now Republican Vice Presidential Candidate only days before the announcement.

I received yet another intern perk this past week. All of the interns had the opportunity to tour the Indiana War Memorial downtown. They have a large collection of war propaganda posters, which I am particularly fond of myself. It was such a wonderful collection of war memorabilia and information. I suggest that everyone make it out to the Indiana War Memorial at some point! To the left is an image from inside the Shine Room.

As promised in my last blog, I am going to share more wisdom I have gained throughout my internship. My colleagues left me with some insight into the professional HR world during our meetings last week. I would like to share some paraphrased accounts of them with you.

3. You will excel if you have the spirit, positivity and enthusiasm. To fuel these characteristics, you must work selflessly. This will help you reach new points in relationships, which will give you the leverage to produce great work. Being open and receptive to feedback will help you grow as a professional. Let your mentors and colleagues know that you are open and eager for criticism.

I am open to comments, questions, and concerns. Please leave them below in the comments! For more words of wisdom I have gained these past weeks, look for my blogs bi- weekly! Stay tuned.


Shae


Thursday, July 21, 2016

Payton's Intern Guide to SPD


Hi everyone!

These past couple weeks at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) kept Shae and I very busy! We were given three different projects to focus on during the two weeks we were there, as well as had the opportunity to meet the other BMV interns and many different BMV executives.

The first project we focused on was BMV department name changes. This consisted of talking with the different executives in charge of the departments and deciding on a new department name that fits these employees’ day-to-day tasks. After we decided on the names, we helped the different employees into their right departments, making sure all the new information was correct and ready to update in the system.

The next project we worked on was looking through employee disciplines for 2015 and 2016 to identify the different policies and procedures employees had broken. The purpose of this was to hopefully see a pattern in the policies and procedures broken, and use that to help update and better the employee training programs so that there are less employee disciplines in the future.

The last project I worked on was analyzing the turnover rate for a BMV department. This was an interesting project to work on because it gave me the opportunity to compare turnover rates for different positions and understand more how this data could be helpful information when using it to better retention and recruiting for positions.

There were also a couple different activities planned for all Governor’s Summer Interns. All of us interns attended a speech given by Governor Mike Pence in his office. We learned about the different history held there, and had the chance to ask him questions. We also all participated in a tour of the War Memorial Museum, which was an amazing learning experience!

Time has really flown by this summer. I only have a month left of this internship before I head back to school! Make sure to read my last two blogs!

Payton Reardon

HR Intern

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Payton's Intern Guide to SPD

Hi Everyone!

These past couple weeks have been filled with many different projects and activities! After wrapping up the I-9 project with the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), we got started on breaking down the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI) career fair metrics. This project consisted of recording and organizing data from the past two year’s career fairs. After recording the data we focused on deciding which data was useful and how we could turn that into helpful information. Our overall goal was to show what has been making the career fairs successful and how we can continue improving them. I really enjoyed this project because we got to use the information we learned from the system consultant last week and try to implement that in our own way.

The past couple weeks also consisted of two Agency Leadership Panel Discussions, which were planned for all the summer interns. This gave us the chance to listen to and learn about multiple different professionals. We received some great advice from everyone to help us with our journeys to the “real world.”

Finally, Shae and I got to wrap up the recruiting for the fall internship position! The past two weeks we helped with interviews for all of our chosen candidates.  It was a great experience to sit on the other side of the interview! It was so great to see all of our work recruiting for this position come together.
Our next two weeks will be spent at a different agency, the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), so don’t miss out on the next blog!

Payton Reardon
HR Intern

Friday, July 8, 2016

Intern Words of Wisdom - by Shae

Last week, I participated in a lunch and learn hosted by our data analytics manger. His project is to provide relevant data to Human Resource Professionals within State Government. The main goals of using analytics are to drive the mission, find priorities, and analyze the impact of HR within the business. Allowing data analytics to show us quick wins in business processes allows us to reach these goals. These quick wins answer smaller questions such as turnover rate or find correlations between factors such as distance from work and retention. The quick wins don’t necessarily dictate projects, but they do influence choices. Moving forward, we want to use our HR data to forecast future trends which will allow us to become more proactive. This allows us to refine processes to improve the Indiana State Personnel Department as a whole. The better processes we have in place, the more efficient the HR staff will become. Gaining this data is a way to accurately measure the successes of the HR team. We are proving our worth one drill down at a time. We must remember to always have a benchmark to measure our success, as a number is only worth as much as its relativity. It was a joy to sit in this meeting, as I am always looking for ways to grow and improve.

Shae