- Posted on 26 Sep 2023
- 4-minute read
With a bit of planning, Bendelta created an internship experience where tandem learning was able to occur for both the students, and their staff.
In meeting rooms and Zoom calls around Australia, business leaders are discerning how to better harness cognitive diversity in the workplace.
However accepting different skills and ideas in real-time project development remains fraught for many organisations, with disagreements and shattered productivity remaining some of the very real consequences of trying.
In 2022, Bendelta, a strategic leadership consultancy firm, observed some workplace collaboration that, rather curiously, didn’t seem to have these pre-existing tensions.
“People often talk about cognitive diversity, and how to deal with it, but one day I was watching this group of twenty-something-year-olds who were actually just doing it as they worked together, as if it was second nature,” said Nina Dejmanee, an organisational psychologist at Bendelta.
They were interns
The company offered two-month internship placements for six interns who were studying a Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation (BCII) at UTS, in addition to a core degree in a specific discipline (engineering, communications and business).
For Dejmanee, the interns she hosted at Bendelta certainly exceeded her expectations.
“I will admit that I was optimistic but cautious going into it because these experiences can be so variable for both the intern and the host organisation,” she said.
People often talk about cognitive diversity, and how to deal with it, but one day I was watching this group of twenty-something-year-olds who were actually just doing it as they worked together, as if it was second nature.
An internship experience, with an innovation twist
In deciding to take on six students at the same time, Bendelta decided they would split the students into two teams and set them each a different creative brief.
This was a broad question, or problem space, which they would be asked to explore over the course of their time with the company.
For Amber Rudgley, a Business and BCII student, coming into a structured internship program was a real highlight of the experience.
“They spent half a day with us onboarding, taking us through the briefs, giving us rooms to work from during our internship and making us feel comfortable,” she said. “And from that point, they just let us be adults.”
At the conclusion of their internships, each multidisciplinary team was invited to present their innovative findings and practices back to a corporate executive at Bendelta.
For the organisation, having interns that were given the time and space to work independently, yielded more interesting results than if they had been asked to shadow everyday tasks, Dejmanee said.
“With them working in small groups, there was a positive balance of competitiveness and cross-fertilisation of ideas,” she said.
And for the students, it was nice to feel like they had walked into an organisation that was excited to have them there, and genuinely wanted to see what they could do.
It’s nice to know the intense month of internship work was taken seriously and we weren't just working on something that was going to be thrown away.
Ben Morrison, a Communications (Media Arts and Production) and BCII student said this was markedly different from other, more traditional internships he’d completed in the past.
“Prior to starting at Bendelta, I had completed a couple of internships where you kind of get pushed to the side, you're doing unpaid work and you don't find too much meaning behind what you did,” he said. “But [Bendelta] really wanted to push their innovation practices and were aligned with the thinking we have been exposed to in BCII.”
One of the key learnings for Dejmanee was also seeing how these BCII students were able to work effectively together, across their various disciplines, work styles and personalities.
“I think they did it exceptionally well, and I’ve worked with established teams and very experienced professionals who are still working very hard at achieving that,” she said. “I learned a lot from watching them work together and it was quite humbling to see how respectful they were of each other, in a very constructive way.”
All six students BCII students were offered a part-time contract at Bendelta on completion of their internship while they complete their final year of studies at UTS.
Jet Hodgson, an Engineering and BCII student, said when they came back to Bendelta as a staff member, it was exciting to see that some of the work they’d generated during their internship was still being developed by the company.
Arielle Harrison, a Business and BCII student, said seeing their student work being taken to the next level was a validating experience as a young professional.
“It’s nice to know the intense month of internship work was taken seriously and we weren't just working on something that was going to be thrown away.”
Many thanks to the Bendelta team who engaged with the students for their Innovation Internship A in Summer 2021/22 and congratulations to the student team (Amber Rudgley, Annecy Boys, Arielle Harrison, Ben Morrison, Jet Hodgson and Olivia Taragel).
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