Internship

This year, I took in a student-trainee. An intern. Her email message expressing her interest to be an intern came at the perfect time–when I needed someone to help me with the Annual Report of our office.

When the news about it spread in the office, some officemates referred to the intern as an assistant of our group. I did not like it.

So, when we had a staff meeting, I formally announced about the internship. Along with the introduction of the intern was a reminder to all my officemates that she is not an assistant. She is a student-trainee with a customised learning and development plan.

I feel bad when people refer to interns as merely assistants, whom you can assign dirty jobs or miscellaneous tasks. For me, internship entails responsibility on both parties, the sending university and the accepting organisation.

A university sends its students as interns with high hopes that they could learn skills and knowledge, or gain experience. These learnings can be used by the intern in his/her work after graduation or may be shared plainly to other students.

The accepting organisation, therefore, has a duty to teach or impart knowledge and skills to a student-trainee. The learning and development plan does not include photocopying documents and will never have an item on preparing a good coffee for any staff or the boss.

I hope that the intern will learn valuable lessons related to working in a government office. And when she does, I hope she will use it to upgrade her performance in her future endeavours.

All In A Day’s Work

It’s mid-year and requests to submit performance reports are raining.

I received a request to fill-out a form. When I opened the file, I found out that I only have “viewing” access, thus, I cannot edit the file. When I told the sender that I can only view the file, I got a “you should have requested access”. I am asked to provide and indicate information in a file that can only be accessed or edited upon request.

I was asked to provide information, but I have to request access in order to provide the needed information? What is the logic? I learned that access should be requested to track those who will edit. But then again, they asked me to provide information that should be indicated in the given blank sheet.

This is a prime example to illustrate what the general public say about government service or government agencies or government employees. That government is inefficient. As a government employee, I get offended by such statement. I am always doing my best to provide a good service to people, to give them something they can be proud of. But it is disheartening when your co-government employees are giving the best examples of inefficient government service.

We are not even talking about trust yet. And trust is critical in government service. The people entrusted their lives to government officials and workers, whom they think can guide and assist them in all facets of development. If one government employee cannot trust another government employee, then there is definitely wrong with the way we serve the people.

The online sheet where we would be indicating the needed and requested information was sent to a “known” group of employees. It has several subsheets or tabs assigned per member of the “known” group. Did they think that a member of the “known” group would sabotage or destroy the work or the information provided by the other member in the other subsheet? If I would get a “Yes!”, then I am greatly diminished. We trust them but they don’t trust us. We celebrated our Golden Jubilee years ago, but it is apparent that we have yet to reach the level of maturity where employees do not pull each other back to the ground.

It is saddening that the oath of government employees we recite during a Flag Ceremony is only good for memorisation. And that it has no place at all in a day’s work.