IRIO Placement Report
German Corporation for International Cooperation
GIZ Innovation Fund
Course Number: LYX400M10 Student: Elena Mertel
Student number: S3307018
Study: M.A. IRIO - European Integration
Corporation: German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) Department: Innovation, Learning, Knowledge
Location: Eschborn, Germany Supervisor: Mr. B. L. Aardema
Table of Content
Introduction 3
1 The Application Procedure, The Decision and Moving to Frankfurt am Main …. 4
2 The Organisation and Branch …... 4
3 The Department and the Innovation Fund …... 5
4 My Tasks …... 6 5 Supervision ..…... 9 Personal Reflection 9 6 Expectations …... 9 7 Challenges …... 10 8 Learnings …... 11
9 Outlook and Future Career Prospects …... 14
Conclusion 15
Introduction
The advantages of doing an internship instead of an additional seminar were clear to me from the start of my Master studies. Though I would have enjoyed acquiring additional academic knowledge on a specific issue area as well, the chance to gain insights into the professional field of an IR related working environment was highly appealing to me. Especially since my former working experiences were limited to the other non-related branches the placement constituted an appealing opportunity to improve my CV and to facilitate entering the job market after finishing my studies.
I began searching for a placement in July 2018, wrote 9 applications and had 5 job interviews before I started the Innovation Management internship for the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) in mid-September. Accordingly, the following report gives an overview on the organisation and the department I was working for for the past 6 months, elaborates on my main tasks and reflects upon expectations, challenges and lessons learned during that time. Moreover, I discuss about the value of the internship for my future career and to what extent it relates to my Master studies. The issues of financial considerations, finding an accommodation and recommendations for prospective interns at GIZ in Eschborn are briefly tackled as well.
1
The Application Procedure, The Decision and Moving To
Frankfurt am Main
Having a strong interest in identity politics, European Neighbourhood Policy and developmental cooperation, there was a wide range of placement opportunities for me. However, I did not have the luxury to choose freely from all the internships I was interested in due to financial matters. The reimbursement for the internship had to cover the living costs in the city where I would live, the instalments of the university's tuition fee and an additional sum for food, public transportation etc. during the period of the placement. Accordingly, I had to cross out a variety of internships that seemed much interesting to me. Unfortunately, this even held true for a highly promising offer I received from the Brussels-based department of the German Association of Local Utilities of municipally determined infrastructure undertakings and economic enterprise (VKU e.V.). As stated by the association, the topics dealt with during the internship would have matched the knowledge I had acquired during my Master studies in the field of European integration to a large extent.
Slightly less matching but still highly interesting, then, was the placement offer from the department Digital Change at GIZ, which I decided to accept. The placement combined the various different aspects of working in an international corporation, included many thematically diverse issues related to development cooperation and also comprised methodological approaches that are primarily found within the start-up scene. Lastly, the placement was also remunerated in accordance with all listed expenses. Those were the major reasons that convinced me to practice the internship at GIZ.
The following procedure went seamlessly. I was invited for a phone interview after I had sent my application. One day later, I received the confirmation that the department was interested in working with me for the following six months. Even though the starting date was only two weeks later, I was lucky to receive and hand in all the required documents and contracts in the given time and even managed to find an apartment in Frankfurt am Main.
Even though GIZ is located in Eschborn, many of the interns decide to find an accommodation in Frankfurt due to its higher quality of living. Accordingly, the costs of living are relatively high as well and it is difficult to find rooms in shared apartments for less than 500€ per month. Nevertheless, with the monthly salary of approximately 1,100€ net, I was able to sustain myself in Frankfurt for the placement period.
2
The Organisation and Branch
The German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) is one of the world's largest development aid agency with approximately 20,076 employees and 90 departments in more than 120 countries around the world (GIZ 2018a, 2018b)1. The corporation implements technical
cooperation projects on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) as its main contracting authority. However, it further cooperates with a multitude of governmental and non-governmental organisations, ministries and other key actors on a global scale. (GIZ 2018b). The organisation thus describes itself as a public-benefit federal enterprise (GIZ 2018a).
We help organisations, public authorities and private businesses to optimise their organisational, managerial and production processes. And, of course, we advise governments on how to achieve objectives and implement nationwide change processes by incorporating them into legislation and strategies. The political and social framework plays a crucial role in ensuring reforms are effective and sustainable. Without an enabling environment, changes remain superficial and have no real impact in the medium term. (GIZ 2018c)
Concurrently, innovation has become a major issue in the corporate ecosystems and also gained keen attention within GIZ in order to fulfil the above mentioned work approach. Innovation is understood as new ideas which, once implemented, create a concrete benefit for its users (GIZ concept paper 2018, 3). Consequently, among other measurements, GIZ established the GIZ Innovation Fund.
3
The Department and the Innovation Fund
In 2017, GIZ established an internal Innovation Fund in order to improve its service delivery in international development projects through innovative tools and nurture its corporate innovation culture. GIZ staff from projects all over the world were able to submit ideas on how to improve development aid projects on site. From these submissions, six teams are chosen each year to turn their ideas into Minimum Viable Products2 through an accelerator programme, applying
human-centered design (Impact Hub 2018).
The project starts with a one-week Boot Camp in October where the depicted teams present their ideas and analyse together with the Innovation Fund Team and its partners Impact Hub Berlin and FutureGov how to improve and implement these projects within the following months. Each team
1 Numbers as at December 31, 2018.
2 A Minimum Viable Product describes a first version of a product that is „complete enough to demonstrate the value it brings to the users“ (Rancic Moogk 2012, 24). It serves to give a high amount of insights for the creators with the least effort necessary (Ries 2009).
receives professional and financial support in order to conduct a thorough user research, identify potential stakeholders, create a first prototype and present its Minimum Viable Product at the end of the seven months accelerator, at the Final Pitch Event.
My assignment throughout the past six months was to follow the whole conception and implementation of the Innovation Fund, ranging from the Boot Camp, where the six chosen teams present their first ideas until the actual Final Pitch Event (seven months later), where the most innovative ideas will be awarded. During these seven months, the teams were guided by professionals under the coordination of the department of Digital Change – Innovation, Learning,
Knowledge. Thus, the assignments of the department are manifold. They identify the most
promising international innovations, organize the Innovation Fund events, develop concepts that are guided by principles of Lean Start-Up and Human-Centered Design in order to guarantee the feasibility of the innovations on site of the actual development projects, and they are also responsible for internal and external communication concerning the Innovation Fund.
Apart from tasks related to the Innovation Fund, the Department is also consulting GIZ projects on how to implement innovative approaches in the projects. My tasks in particular are introduced in the next section.
4
My Tasks
Due to the cross sectoral nature of the Innovation Fund, my tasks were manifold and allowed me to gain qualifications in numerous different professional activities. This fact was further supported by the thematically diverse projects that are part of the Accelerator Programme.
My main assignments included the organization and preparation of events related to the Innovation Fund, external and internal communication, especially the maintenance of the Innovation Fund website and blog, conducting an interim evaluation of the Innovation Fund and supporting the team members from all over the world who are participating in the Accelerator Programme. In the following, I will give a brief overview on each of these aspects and what it meant for my daily work.
Organization and Preparation of Innovation Fund events
During the placement period, two important events took place that needed a fair amount of preparation and follow-up. The first event, the Boot Camp, marked the beginning of the Accelerator Programme. The 4-days workshop took place in the beginning of October 2018 in
Berlin. The second event, the Mid-Term Workshop was split into three small group workshops in three locations (Bangkok, Nairobi and Berlin) and happened in the end of February.
For all events, it was essential to plan ahead and except for the content preparation I was the person in charge for all organizational issues. This included locating and booking a suitable workshop location, hotel and restaurants, providing the teams with all the documents and information needed, assisting the teams with travel and visa preparations etc. Contentwise, we planned the events in a team consisting of Henrike Klavert, my supervisor and the initiator of the Innovation Fund, our colleague Felix Krause and one colleague each from our two cooperating institutions, the Impact Hub and FutureGov. Unlike of what I expected before I started the internship, I was treated as an 'equal' colleague and my opinion was considered as valuable as of everyone else. Consequently, I prepared and held sessions during the workshops myself, which I highly appreciated. The follow-ups of the events, then, mainly included the evaluation of feedback given, the documentation and lessons learned, as well as maintaining in constant exchange with the teams. From the beginning of this year on, I also started the preparations for the final event of the Innovation Fund – the Final Pitch.
In between the workshops, three so-called Milestone Meetings were arranged via Skype with each of the six teams individually. Also for those two hour meetings I was in charge of setting appointments, supporting the teams before and afterwards and providing my own feedback on the results presented by the teams during the session.
External and Internal Communication
Since the Innovation Fund is only in its second year and at the same time the flagship for the corporation's innovative orientation, the right means of communication are of central significance for its success. In contrast to the first round, this year's Innovation Fund was open for external participants, meaning that not only GIZ staff member were eligible to submit ideas. Therefore, it was of prime interest to increase the contest's visibility outside GIZ. At the same time, we had to make sure to reach out to all GIZ staff members, informing them about the idea submission phase, the progress of the six winner teams during the Accelerator Programme and also what happened to the winners and the ideas of the piloting round.
The responsibility for these tasks lay mainly with Felix Krause and me. In the beginning of my internship we were supported by two journalists. However, since the cooperation was not as
successful as we hoped for, Felix Krause and I decided to write all texts and reports ourselves. For internal communication this primarily comprised writing blog articles for the intranet website (that I set up myself and was in charge of during the whole placement period), generating leaflets and fact sheets about the teams and their progress; working together with the corporate communications in order to publish articles in the staff magazine and on the intranet start page of GIZ. For external communication, it included setting up and managing a LinkedIn page, creating a two-pager about Innovation Management within GIZ for external experts and preparing articles to be published in the 'external' magazine Akzente by GIZ.
The Interim Evaluation of the Innovation Fund
Since it is only the second year of conducting the contest, it is of high significance to evaluate its implementation and improve those lessons learned from each round. Accordingly, another intern from a partner department and I generated a questionnaire and conducted interviews on the Call
for Ideas phase of the Innovation Fund. After having spoken with 15 colleagues from all over the
world, we wrote an interim report that was published on the start page of GIZ's intranet.
Supporting the Teams of the Accelerator Programme
During my internship, I was the first person to be addressed when having Innovation Fund related questions. Therefore, I managed the Innovation Fund email address and answered enquiries on a daily basis.
Additional Tasks
In order to support my department further, I wrote an onboarding manual for new colleagues. This task was out of my own initiative since I was not all too satisfied with my own onboarding and this opinion merged with the experiences of other employees of the department who had started their jobs after me. Additionally, I also did background researches such as examining social impact measurements within and beyond GIZ. Another task and probably one of the most challenging ones during my internship, was generating a questionnaire and an evaluation matrix for another innovation contest within GIZ. This was part of a consulting contract that I was usually not allowed to be involved in since the information provided are too confidential. However, given the trust and the opportunity to work on such an important task was a great experience for me. It further
motivated me to do some additional research on all projects that GIZ is working on in order to find a potential department to do a work shadowing. Thus, in February I was able to do a (mini-) work shadowing at another department that was of interest for me.
After giving an overview of the various tasks, the next paragraph describes the forms of supervision provided by the organisation.
5
Supervision
The supervision and feedback was primarily performed by Henrike Klavert. We had a 30 minutes feedback session every month and in between I always had the possibility to address her with questions and concerns. Henrike provided me with a very clear and constructive feedback which was remarkably helpful during the internship period and also for prospective jobs. For feedback that was directly related to certain assignments, I also received response from Felix Krause. He was furthermore the person I could address when Henrike was absent.
Additionally, I was granted an onboarding by the former intern and the team in the beginning and a personal job reference at the end of the internship. Unfortunately, the onboarding was not realized. I will refer back to this in the Challenges section.
Since there are approximately 1,400 interns working for GIZ worldwide at a time, the corporation has an extra office for all internship related concerns. In addition, this office organises regular network and information meetings. During my internship I attended one of the meetings and it provided me with helpful insights on future working prospects at GIZ.
After having described the tasks and opportunities granted by my placement provider, in the following sections I will elaborate on my personal expectations, challenges and learnings.
Personal Reflection
6
Expectations
Due to the fact that all my former working experience was not performed in IR-related fields, I did not really know what to expect, to be honest. Therefore, I was looking much forward to gaining valuable work experience before applying for jobs. Considering this circumstance, my
expectations before the placement primarily concerned the acquisition of professional knowledge, skills and experience, but also to discover daily routines of the department and the interconnectedness (if existent) of the various departments and projects of GIZ.
Moreover, I was interested in how to locate the Innovation Fund within the corporation since I was not aware of the significance of innovation management for many corporations these days. From what the job offer revealed, I would get in contact with several methodological approaches that were completely new to me, such as Human-Centered Design, Agile Working, Innovation Labs/Incubators etc. The only concept that I had known from another internship was Lean Start-up. I did a workshop on lean working when I was intern at the International Marketing department for Forbo flooring and it left a lasting impression on me. Therefore, I was eager to find out more about the other approaches as well and how the implementation of those start-up concepts would work in a 20,000+ employees corporation.
Additionally, I was hoping to be able to work on assignments largely independent and being treated as a full member of the team while getting a sufficient supervision and feedback by my mentor. Furthermore, I assumed that I could make use of my academic knowledge and skills to a certain degree, though I expected that it would rather serve as a basis for understanding why different projects are implemented or why the participating teams are in need of innovative approaches within their projects.
What I did not expect was that I would have the possibility to work on so many different issues in only one internship. Moreover, I could not foresee the extent of responsibility that I had during the placement. In many occasions this fact challenged me while I also appreciated it a lot. I will elaborate on that more closely in the following section.
7
Challenges
In my application I mentioned that I am quick in understanding and mastering new topics and it turned out to be essential for my work for the Innovation Fund. Already from the beginning on, I was treated as a full member of the team. I highly appreciated this attitude but it also pressured me since I did not possess the knowledge required for all the tasks that were given to me right from the start. This was further challenged by the fact that I started the internship in a very intensive period of the Innovation Fund and none of my colleagues had the time to provide me with an appropriate onboarding. I did not expect that I would work on my own from the beginning on while having tight deadlines at the same time. I had the impression that my team was expecting me to know how to do tasks already from the beginning on, which is simply not
possibly without a proper onboarding. Therefore, I talked with my supervisor about my apprehension in our first feedback session although I felt a bit uncomfortable to 'complain' at such an early stage. However, it turned out to be the right way and the team tried to support me to a greater extent from then on.
Since I also realised that other colleagues (interns and employees alike) had similar problems in the beginning, I offered to write an onboarding manual giving some first ideas on how to work for the department. Directly communicating when tasks were not clear to me or beyond my time capacities helped me to overcome this obstacle but since I did not want the next intern to experience a similar situation, I addressed the topic again in my last feedback session. Together with my supervisor, we came up with several points that hopefully facilitate the first weeks for the next intern and I was happy to realise that my supervisor appreciated the discussion.
Stressful situations and tight deadlines reappeared nevertheless during the remaining time of the internship but with the increasing knowledge and confidence in my skills, they became a welcome challenge to me. I learned to solve difficult assignments and problems that I thought I could not overcome in the beginning. I was challenged a lot but since I knew that the internship was terminated to six months, I was willing to get as much out of it as possible. However, to pre-empt one of the lessons learned during the placement, in future jobs I will not keep such a high demand of expectations towards myself since it bears high potential of becoming onerous after a longer period of time.
Another challenge towards the end of the internship was related to my wish to do a work shadowing in another department. It was clear to me that my supervisor was not in favour of this idea because I had become an essential part of the Innovation Fund core time (consisting of Henrike Klavert, Felix Krause and me) and the work shadowing would mean that I was absent from the department for a week. After my proposal, we arranged a meeting in order to discuss about it. I explained why I considered it to add value to my internship and after the discussion, we decided on a compromise of a) doing a mini-work shadowing for two days, b) Henrike would connect me with several consultants that are working on the topics I am interested in and c) going to an external 2-day Innovation Convention in order to find out more about working within the field of Innovation Management.
In my opinion, this is a good example of my major learning for future jobs in general, communicating obstacles, thoughts and wishes and being able to support them with profound arguments always turned out to be very worthwhile for me. In the following section, I will draw on other lessons learned during the internship.
8
Learnings
Reflecting on the past six months, it feels like I did more than only one placement since it was such an enriching experience in many respects. It helped me enormously to gain new professional skills and knowledge in various fields, but it also made me realize what my strengths and weaknesses are, what I expect from prospective jobs and where I need to be persistent.
The first paragraph of this section refers to general working skills that I acquired while the second part concentrates on the internships content and how it relates to my studies.
I highly valued having a lot of personal freedom in how I work on my tasks and which tasks I prefer over others but this likewise meant that I had considerable responsibilities. I learned how to work independently, but also in a team and how to act when a cooperation is not working as it is supposed to. Closely related to this, I acknowledged the importance of being persistent since in many occasions one does not receive a response to the first, second or third email – and especially not when it says 'intern' next to the sender's email address. Therefore, it was crucial to find ways on how to receive information or assistance nevertheless. I realized that it is vital in a corporation with 20,000+ staff members to encourage personal exchange as much as possible. Thus, when I needed to get assistance from a person I had not met before, I rather called them or even went to their offices in order to create a personal relation. This was of great use for me since I was responsible for so many diverse assignments. Having colleagues in different departments always facilitated long searches for documents or guidelines and the like.
At the same time, I experienced the importance of networking in the branch. It had not occurred to me beforehand and it was really alienating in the beginning. This is because GIZ remains a highly hierarchical institution and being in contact with colleagues of higher ranks seems to be crucial. I was not used to present myself and my professional background in so many occasions – especially in informal settings such as the lunch break. Though it might seem insignificant, testing different options of introducing myself helped me to gain more confidence and realize how different aspects of my acquired knowledge are perceived.
Looking back on the past six months, I managed to build my own network including colleagues from various countries. This was possible due to the diverse cultural and professional backgrounds of the teams participating in the Innovation Fund, but also with the help of the interviews I conducted for the interim evaluation report. I was given the freedom to choose my interviewees freely from all staff members worldwide. Respectively, I was enormously lucky to interview a
colleague from Ukraine who is interested in working with me in the future since I am planning to write my Master thesis about a topic closely related to her work.
Further, I learned how to work under stress and how to prioritize tasks over others. After my Bachelor studies and the intensive six months of Master lectures, I thought that I already had a good command of self-organization and stress resistance. However, during the placement I faced very challenging work phases and learned effective coping strategies and means of compensating stress.
Contentwise, I gained highly valuable knowledge in a multitude of work sectors. First, many issues addressed helped me to understand how topics discussed in academia are put into practice. This was not only due to all the insights provided by the team members of the six winner teams of the Innovation Fund, but also to regular events and workshops that informed about current projects and challenges GIZ staff member face during their service, about how the Sustainable Development Goals can be implemented in our work and informative events about global agreements among many other topics. With my contribution to a consultancy assignment and research on the concept of Capacity Works, I discovered various aspects that have to be taken into account when working in a foreign country. As central for any considerations for developmental cooperation, the knowledge acquired during my studies on postcolonial theory was fundamental to bring critical assessment on topics addressed and projects implemented.
Moreover, it was a fortunate coincidence that one of the winner teams of the Innovation Fund tries to tackle the problem of wrongful waste management in Serbia and its neighbouring countries – a topic on which I had recently written a research paper on. My academic specialization on European integration was of advantage when consulting the European winner teams (2 out of 6), since I could profit from the knowledge on European policy-making that I had acquired during one of my research seminars.
Second, in addition to knowledge that build upon topics I came across during my studies, I gained basic insights on professional qualifications that ever so often appear in job advertisements for IR-related activities. These include issue areas such as communication, organization and preparation of events, qualitative and quantitative evaluation, business-oriented methodological approaches (including human-centered design, agile working, scrum, lean start-up) and some basic insights into project management.
Moreover, I had my first salary negotiations because I was offered a position as an external consultant for Innovation Management in order to support the Innovation Fund team until the
Final Pitch event in the end of May. It is not common that interns get offered a job as a consultant and constituted that the effort I had put into my work in the last six months was ultimately valued. Referring to the above mentioned salary negotiations, it was a great opportunity for me to gain confidence in negotiating which will be of use for future jobs as well. In the next section I will thus elaborate on future career prospects.
9
Outlook and Future Career Prospects
As already indicated, I highly value the qualifications gained during my internship. Hence, it already turned out to be worthwhile since I received the offer of working as an external consultant for GIZ. Moreover, I had the chance to build my own network and even have future prospects of working together with a Ukrainian GIZ department while writing my thesis.
Besides those concrete prospects, I realized that developmental cooperation is a sector that will be of high interest for me when applying for jobs. Though for a career start, I would prefer a more hands-on work with slightly less responsibilities and pressure. This is because the department of Innovation, Knowledge, Learning is in the focus of interest of the management board and therefore has numerous tasks of high accountability. As a placement, this was the perfect department to acquire professional knowledge. However, it requires a profound working experience to master all tasks required for the position in order to have a proper work-life balance. Though my supervisor was trying to make sure that I do not need to work overtime, I recognized that the junior consultants3 of our department were working long hours almost on a
daily basis in order to cope with all the tasks they have to fulfil. In general, I want to have a challenging occupation and I am aware that it is necessary in almost every job to do overtime occasionally. Nevertheless, I realized during the placement that for the moment, I prefer a job with slightly less responsibilities. In this respect, the internship also provided me with more clarity what I expect from future jobs.
Contentwise, all the topics I dealt with for the Innovation Fund were deeply inspiring and it was exceptional to witness highly motivated people who can actually cause social impact. Therefore, I also developed an interest in a branch of whose existence I was not aware of before the internship. Institutions such as Impact Hub, Social Impact Lab or FutureGov help individuals or small enterprises to implement socially valuable projects. However, also GIZ has become highly
3 Junior positions were created several years ago in order to enable young less experienced professionals to find work in GIZ. Only those who have less than two years of relevant work experience are eligible to apply.
relevant for my future career. Though as stated, I would prefer to work in a less hierarchically significant department for the start. Therefore, I am looking forward to experiencing what opportunities the cooperation with the Ukrainian department will hold for me.
Conclusion
Concluding, the past six months were above all my expectations before the internship. I gained a lot of insights on GIZ, the branch of developmental cooperation and whether it could serve as a prospective career path for me – certainly, it does.
As I was hoping for before the placement, it thus helped me to locate myself, my abilities, qualifications and interests within an IR-related working environment. I have a clearer notion on daily routines (if existent) within the corporation and thus know better what I wish and wish not for future jobs.
An advice for prospective interns at the department or GIZ in general would be to not shy away from communicating if tasks are unclear, beyond your capabilities or not possible to fulfil within the given deadline. I further hope that I have contributed on a small scale that the start of future interns of the department will be a bit easier as it was for me. However, the tough start also had its good sides since it made me more self-confident in my capabilities and what I am able to achieve and likewise what not.
I acquired various new skills that will be likely to improve my stance on the job market significantly. Moreover, the internship has already provided me with additional opportunities by offering me the consultant position and connecting me with numerous people who might be of interest for future job searches.
In sum, the internship at GIZ was highly demanding, challenging at certain points, but also ultimately rewarding.
Bibliography
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