Job Description Revised
My job as a business development intern at RSM US LLP is fun, challenging, and unique. It pushes me to think carefully and helps me improve my problem-solving skills, making me a better student and a more focused analyst. I gained my first experience in the corporate world through this job, which introduced me to the concepts of hybrid work, company culture, and professionalism. This experience has given me a much clearer vision of the career path and work environment I want to pursue after graduation.
You might be wondering, what exactly does a business development intern do? Business development interns support the overall business development team by reviewing a company’s growth strategies. We help the team understand what’s working well and what areas need improvement, and our main task is to identify strengths and weaknesses within the current strategy. When we identify these strengths and weaknesses, we then relay that information to our team so that they plan accordingly.
To accurately support the business development team in this way, I analyze data, review case studies, and do market research. These activities help me get a clear picture of the company’s situation so I can drive growth. The job title sounds broad, but it is quite specific. Even though my work often supports many departments of the company, the goals of the business development team remain the same: driving the company's growth.
Now, how exactly do business developers drive the company’s growth? To successfully support the company, we engage in a data-driven strategy that is guided by a core set of stages. These three main stages of my role as a business development intern are:
Research
Analyze
Recommend
These steps usually happen in this exact order and apply to most projects I work on throughout the year. I’ll break down these activities below and explain what each one entails.
Research is the foundation and starting point for any business development project. It’s the most important part of the decision-making process. When I begin researching a new project, I ask myself questions to guide my work:
What’s the main question I need to answer?
What smaller questions relate to the main one?
What sources will help me find the answer?
Where can I find these sources?
These questions help me break down the research into distinct steps, making sure I cover all angles and get the right information needed to advise the team. To achieve this, some sources I might use include internal sales data, marketing strategies, competitor strategies, search engine trends, and customer acquisition funnels. After listing these sources, I gather and organize the relevant data and put it into one big folder that I share with my team.
After finishing the research, my team and I move on to the analysis phase. This is when we go beyond just collecting information and start to understand what it means. In this stage, I read charts, study graphs, compare marketing campaigns or past strategies, and look for trends in large data sets to find potential shifts that may be important to the company. When I analyze the data, I think of it as reading a story, uncovering key changes and important moments that stand out. As I go through the story, I learn how and why certain things happen in the company. I take notes on the important findings that will help solve the problem at hand and collaborate with my team to make sure I don't miss any key points.
Finally, after my team and I finish the research and analysis, we make recommendations. Recommendations are the most important part of my job. They help push the business forward and create positive changes. To make solid and realistic recommendations, I review the conclusions my team and I reached during the analysis phase and create action items based on what we found. For example, if I see that my company is losing deals at a certain stage of the customer acquisition funnel, I might suggest ways to improve that specific stage. I always support my recommendations with evidence and provide clear action steps.
Passive Sentences: 0%
Reading Ease: 56.6
Grade Level: 9
The guiding questions were a nice way to better understand your mindset as a development intern, nice touch!
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you broke down the different responsibilities of your role as a business development intern. I would love to learn more about where exactly you worked whether that may be an office space or work from home in addition to the name of your company or business. This could make the passage more interesting for the reader since they'll be able to contextualize where a business development intern works and what industries employ them. Your use of bulletpoints was great in this piece, especially when you included the questions you ask yourself when kickstarting your research process.
ReplyDelete- Momo Messerschmidt
I appreciate your attitude towards learning and gaining experience, I can feel your passion for the work through the writing. I also liked the guiding questions, helps me as an audience member understand a bit of your thought process and choices in your work.
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ReplyDeleteKarly- Thank you for your post. I really appreciated how you framed the business development process, and I feel like I learned a lot from it. Likewise, I had never broken the research process down in that way, and I found it very interesting! RSM seems like a great place to work.
ReplyDeleteI really like the way you broke down your role, particularly how you compared analyzing data to reading a story, as it's a great way to understand uncovering trends and shifts. I also really like the guiding questions you provided, as they offer a lot of insight into how you go about your role and how methodical your approach is!
ReplyDeleteHi Karly! This job description was super well thought out and easy to read! I feel like I genuinely have a good understanding of what you did as a business developer! I really like how you bolded specific words that were important to our understanding, my eye was definitely drawn to those throughout the post. You examples of questions were very helpful as well!
ReplyDeleteHey Karly, I really enjoyed reading your memo. I did not know much about the responsibilities of a business development intern, so it was cool to learn about!
ReplyDeleteHi Karly! I really liked how you added stages to your role & supplemented the research with guiding questions. I think its a very structured and effective way to break down the process. Hope you had a great time at RSM!
ReplyDeleteHey Karly! I thought your job description was very well done. I enjoyed reading about your roles in RSM. It must be a unique experience to work there. It's always good to know about other jobs I did not really know about like being a business developer. Great representation of your job.
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