I’ll start with some information about myself, the Go Green Project I worked on, various other projects I worked on, my take-aways from this internship, and my overall experience at ADP this Summer.
A little bit about myself, I’m going into my Junior year as a student at the University of Louisville. I’m a marketing major, working on minors in communication and entrepreneurship. This fall, I will be in the Netherlands studying at the Hague University.
The most massive project I worked on this summer was The Go Green Project. From the first week I arrived at ADP for about the next four and a half weeks I retrieved up-to-date emails for our 401k clients who either had an invalid email or no email, which means we had to mail them all documents, costing us money in postage, while also using a great deal of paper. I began this project by searching through Clarify to find updated emails for each plan, and for the next stage of this project I searched PES. When I was unable to find an email manually, I called the billing contact on the plan to obtain emails.
From just this one project I learned how to successfully use two of our systems: Clarify and PES. As I progressed in the Go Green Project the systems made more and more sense to me and I began finding ways I could more efficiently search for the emails. I also had to warm up to outbound calls very quickly. The first few felt unnatural and I didn’t feel like I was saying the right things, but I continually reworked my script to be more engaged on the phone and my conversations developed more of a flow as I moved forward. Working with our remote intern, Ryan, was a new experience because for the first time I was collaborating with someone who wasn’t physically in the same location. I learned that in this situation constant communication is vital for the other person understanding exactly what their role is, and as a result he made a huge dent in the number of outbound calls I had to make.
Even though this project consisted of mostly repetitive work I continued to learn and sharpen my skills throughout the duration of it.
The following things resulted from my data clean up efforts.
4622 emails per month will not be printed on paper, saving:
1116 lbs of paper annually = more than 1 ½ Pine trees
This will save ADP 25,000 thousand dollars per year in postage which is the equivalent of my internship expense four times
These are some of the other projects that came up throughout my internship.
Scorecards show ADP’s recommendations. Financial advisors take different investment strategies. Scorecards can reflect poorly on advisors. ADP was proactive about keeping their advisors happy, so we removed the view scorecard option for all advisors against it.
CRD Cleanup was just correcting data that either had the wrong CRD number, which identifies the plan, or the wrong Financial Advisor’s name.
Financial Advisors switch firms frequently, and if they don’t keep us updated they don’t get paid.
Our recent move to this building was the largest move for Retirement Services sector of ADP. Prior to our move into this building, everyone who was going to be home-shored was directed to me so that I could schedule their move out times. Which took the liability off of ADP in case someone dropped a computer monitor or an employee got hurt moving their equipment.
Throughout these past few weeks I ran 5500 reports to give to our advisors so they could see who had and had not filed yet. When our clients don’t file on time, the blame goes to the advisors and to ADP.
One of the biggest things I learned this summer is not to be afraid to ask questions. I’m extremely thankful for you guys who were so willing to answer any questions I had and didn’t make me feel like a burden, especially when I started here knowing very little about ADP and retirement services. I would not have been able to do tasks correctly or understand what I was doing without your help.
Time management is another huge takeaway from this internship. I like being able to write down everything I need to do at the beginning of the day so that I can check things off my list. Many days though, projects are thrown at you throughout the day and you have to make the decision about what is more time sensitive. A big difference between time management at work and at school is that you can get a lot of help from other interns at work, and I can’t make someone else study for me at school. Now have deeper understanding for time management. Working has painted a much broader picture of time management.
Mistakes are inevitable. Make the most of them by learning from them. I have gone through huge spreadsheets and organized data a particular way only to get to the end and realize how much more efficient it would be to have done things completely different.
Part of learning from your mistakes is improving yourself and bettering your own knowledge and skills through those initial mistakes and also learning from other people to better yourself and become a more productive and forward thinking employee. Learn and grow from every experience you have-good or bad.
This was my first time working in a corporate work environment. It was great to see how an office runs, especially when my main idea of an office stemmed from the TV show. I like how collaborative the environment is, and since our move it has become even easier to work with other people because they are so close.
I liked being able to apply what I learned at school to my job here, such as, excel and access from my Computer Information Systems classes, and writing clearly and concisely in emails from Business communication.
I’m looking forward to relating what I learn in school in the future to my internship here.
The importance of positivity at work will carry with me when I look for jobs in the future. Everyone is encouraging and supportive towards each other and I truly believe that the people here are what make this such a great place to work at.
