One Day, One Internship » India

The Advisory Board Company

Willy Franzen — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:59:44 +0000

Consultants are typically seen as hired mercenaries. Sometimes they get a bad rap, but at least they’re compensated well for it. I have to think that those who work at The Advisory Board Company have at least a somewhat better reputation since their company’s clients are all mission driven. What does mission driven mean? Well, most of The Advisory Board Company’s clients are in the healthcare industry (think hospitals and health systems, not insurance providers), but they’ve recently moved into working with universities too. I hadn’t heard of The Advisory Board Company until a One Day, One Job reader e-mailed me (you can reach me at willy@onedayonejob.com if you want to share a tip or success story) to tell me that he recently received a job offer from them. Apparently they do a ton of entry level hiring (along with some interns), and they’re continuing to grow well beyond the 5 employees that they started with in 1979. Since then they’ve grown to more than 1,000 employes, and they’ve served “more than 2,800 leading healthcare and higher education organizations.” Additionally, they’ve grown beyond their corporate headquarters in Washington, DC to having offices in Chicago, IL; San Francisco, CA; Austin, TX; Portland, OR; Nashville, TN; London, UK; and Chennai, India.

Join The Board

Introducing The Advisory Board Company as a consulting firm wasn’t fully accurate. They actually operate quite differently from most consulting practices. Instead of serving clients on an engagement basis, they do most of their work as a membership organization. Hospitals or universities can become The Advisory Board Company members and gain access to the company’s different offerings, which include things like Strategy Research, Clinical Research, Leadership Development, Business Intelligence Analytics, and more. They also provide Management and Consulting services, but it seems that those aren’t the main focus. Still, if you’d consider a career in consulting, The Advisory Board Company could be a nice alternative. Their Careers page goes into a lot of detail about the company’s culture and benefits, and obviously it also has the job listings. Right now there are just over 40 jobs posted and quite a few are entry level. Oddly enough, there’s only one internship posted: Recruiting Intern (it’s paid). Usually companies have lots of internships and not many entry level jobs, but I guess it’s reversed here. If you’re interested in something more closely tied to The Advisory Board Company’s core businesses, I guess you’ll either have to keep checking their job postings or reach out to them and ask about other internships.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What have you heard about The Advisory Board Company?

Intellectual Ventures

Willy Franzen — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:41:01 +0000

One of the books that I’ve been reading lately is SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. It’s a great follow-up to the original Freakonomics, and it once again shows how changing your mindset can lead you to all kinds of new ideas (this is a really important lesson for your career). One of the companies that is mentioned in the book is Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, WA based invention company. They’re all about ideas. Things like product design, product development, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and service all come later, and Intellectual Ventures doesn’t want anything thing to do with those processes. They just invent, invent, invent. The company isn’t tied to one specific area—they’re working on problems like stopping Malaria, preventing hurricanes, and counteracting negative effects from climate change should they ever happen.

An Intellectual Venture for Your Career

For Intellectual Ventures it’s all about owning the intellectual property. They want to come up with the ideas, make them work, and then let other companies do the rest. The business side will be about licensing the technology to the right people on a non-exclusive basis possibly including spin-off companies, but for now it’s all about building a technology portfolio. Intellectual Ventures has been actively inventing since 2003, and since then they’ve filed thousands of patents. These patent applications “span a broad range of areas including computer software and hardware, user interface design, semiconductors, biomedical devices, advanced medical procedures, digital imaging, nanotechnology, nuclear energy and advanced particle physics.” As you can probably tell from that list of topic area (and the company’s name), Intellectual Ventures is filled with extremely smart people. It was founded by two former C level Microsoft executives.

If you’ve always been fascinated by invention and you think that you have the intellect, then you should check out Intellectual Ventures’ Internships page. They have quite a few internships posted right now, and most these include a number of postings each for Laboratory Intern I, Laboratory Intern II, and Senior Laboratory Intern. There’s also one posting for a Nuclear Intern (applicants need not be radioactive). You should also note that Intellectual Ventures has satellite offices in Silicon Valley, Austin, Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, Seoul, and Bangalore, but for now all of their internships re at the Bellevue, WA office. There’s no mention of whether the positions are paid, but I’m strongly inclined to say that they are.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Have you read SuperFreakonomics yet?

Willy Franzen — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:51:24 +0000

A lot of people find it ironic that I put an end to my job search by starting a company that helps other people with their job searches. I’ll admit that it’s a bit odd, but it seems to be working out pretty well. Maybe you’ll do something similar by starting your career with an internship at a job-search focused company like Mountain View, CA based LinkedIn. There are plenty of other companies trying to build professional social networks and online résumé sites, but none of them seem to have any hope competing with LinkedIn. LinkedIn reached critical mass first, and that’s why they’re one of my favorite online job search tools. Not only do they allow you to visualize your own professional network to see whom you’re connected to, but they also let you browse through the networks of different companies to learn more about their organizational structure. Where else can you get access to the résumé (which includes where they interned) of someone whose job you want to have five years down the road? LinkedIn is an amazing tool for smart job and internship seekers, and it’s also an amazing business—they’ve been profitable for nearly three years (which is impressive for a startup of their size and scope).

Get LinkedIn

LinkedIn is obviously much more than a job search tool, but that’s its most common use for college students. If you’re not already on the site, you should sign up today. If you are, you should invest some time and effort into learning more about how to use the site—we have some great tutorials in our job search training course, Found Your Career. This goes doubly if you want to land a job at LinkedIn—I can’t imagine their hiring anyone who isn’t extremely familiar with their product. It wouldn’t make sense. Oddly enough, LinkedIn’s Careers site and Job Search function leave something to be desired. Maybe it’s because I expect theirs to be best of breed, but I’m disappointed. The Careers site provides all of the normal information that you’d expect, and the Job listings are just that—a list of jobs. They don’t seem to have a specific section on internships, so all you can do is look at their job postings—I find using this link more helpful for that, as it will make the results a little easier to sort through. Right now they have a number of internships posted including Summer Software Engineer (iPhone, Mobile) Intern, Summer Software Engineering Intern, Summer Technical Operations Intern, Marketing Intern – Recruitment (Mumbai, India), and Marketing Intern – Inside Advertising Sales (Mumbai, India). They don’t seem to mention whether or not these positions are paid. Since LinkedIn is all about networking, you may even want to skip the job postings, and just focus on using the site to connect with people at the company—that would show true knowledge of how their product works.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Do you use LinkedIn?