“¿Donde Puedo Conseguir Una Buena Cerveza en Cancun?”
(Or Why I Chose Interning at The Hartford versus Bartending in Sunny Cancun)

By Anne Witkavitch
(photo credit The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc.)


Juggling, multitasking, prioritizing – there are a multitude of buzz words that are used to describe the delicate balancing act we all struggle to perform in our daily lives. But when those balls in the air are full-time employee, full-time parent, and full-time graduate student, keeping all of those spheres in motion is in itself a full-time job.

So when the word “internship” appeared among the syllabi for the fall’s sixteen credit semester, my first inclination was to drop all the balls, change my name to ‘Conchita’, take the next flight to Cancun, and begin a new life as a bartender at some swank resort. However, given the opportunity to perform the internship at my full-time job offered me an interesting personal challenge I couldn’t refuse, not even for sunny Cancun – how could I construct an opportunity that would be of value to both my graduate studies and to my employer?

The answer came when I decided to “intern” by developing and facilitating several writing workshops for communicators at The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., where my “real job” is Director of Employee and Executive Communications for the Property & Casualty division.

Our Corporate Relations team is focused on “raising the bar” in three key areas of corporate communications: improving channels, building the network, and enhancing content. My internship focuses on the third leg of that strategy by creating workshops that will help the company’s communication professionals hone their writing skills and develop new competencies in areas like writing for the web and storytelling, which are critical for communicating in the 21st century workplace. Our communication professionals have proactively expressed their interest for some sort of continuing education/curriculum to support skill development; some have a professional background in the communications field, others have transitioned into the role from other functional areas. This presents a huge opportunity to support these colleagues in “raising the bar” in their professional development while helping to improve the quality of product produced for internal communication needs.

When I look at my future goals involving my writing, one area that has always been of interest is to do more training/teaching as it relates to the writing craft and communications profession. While I have some background in training and have facilitated pre-designed workshops, I have not previously developed curriculum. I am looking forward to learning how the process works from start to finish, from analyzing skill development needs, to outlining several workshops and identifying the objectives, learning modules, and benefits of the program, and finally facilitating and measuring results.

I will benefit from the advisement and counsel of Jim Gould, Vice President of Executive and Employee Communications at The Hartford, who will be my sponsor for the internship. Jim holds an M.F.A. from Columbia, and is a former college professor and administrator, as well as a published author and freelance writer. I will be working with Stefanie Dion Jones, a member of our Corporate Relations team, who is spearheading the overall development of a core competency skills enhancement model for The Hartford’s communicators. I will also benefit from the mentoring of several human resource professionals I know who have backgrounds in training. I also expect to tap into the expertise of other professionals I know in the field, particularly to learn about the new technology being used for training, such as webinars and telemars. I anticipate that my reading list will include magazine articles and books that explore these new avenues for delivering training and marketing the offerings, as well as professional trade journals.

The goal of the internship is to develop and deliver several training modules that can easily be replicated and adapted to the evolving needs of The Hartford for its communicator community. As well, I am looking forward to learning about how to develop curriculum so that I may eventually create local workshops for external audiences, such as for my town’s continuing education program, a community college, or as an online offering.

Stef and I have begun the process of creating a survey to measure interest levels of the communicators on a variety of communication topics, including business writing, storytelling, grammar and usage, editing, presentation skills, and others. After analyzing the results of the survey, we’ll choose the top three or four topics of interest. I will then develop the pilot workshops, with my next steps being researching, writing, and developing the teaching modules for each. The final steps will be to schedule and deliver the workshops before the end of the year.

I am looking forward to this internship, not only for the knowledge I’ll gain from the experience but that I’ll also be able to create a valuable mechanism for helping my colleagues develop professionally.

Anyhow, given that my last mixology course was a night class taken while in college many years ago, and that my only retained knowledge of high school Spanish class is limited to the McDonald’s Big Mac jingle, it is probably a good thing that for my internship I’ll be sticking to what I know best – writing, communicating, and The Hartford. Somewhere on the beaches of Cancun, the natives are breathing a sigh of relief.