Summer Internship Design Curriculum
Order Management | May-Oct 2023 | New Service & Feature Set | Shipped Oct 2023Oracle Design created an internship program designed for diversity and inclusion.
It was important to Oracle’s Design leadership to build their employee pipeline from a diverse set of backgrounds globally. Interns pools drew from American HBCUs, art schools in Mexico, and tech schools in India. Whether they are an undergraduate or graduate student, Oracle Design wants to provide interns with the foundation to succeed during and beyond their internship
Not every intern coming in would have had the same access to design education. How can we create a base foundation of success for
The base knowledge and design skills necessary to succeed in software design vary drastically from college to college, nation to nation. This stems from legacy programs not adapting to the demand from the workforce or from the lack of design professionals to teach new methods and subject matters in their local areas. The result is college students have the skills to be successful in history disciplines like marketing and graphic design, but lack the technical skills for UX Design and User Research.
ROLE
Design Ops Partner
CONTRIBUTION
I created a 12 week summer internship and bootcamp curriculum and enlisted the help of leaders to share their expertise.
CHALLENGE
Design and build a 12-week curriculum and supporting content for an early-in-career intern audience.
Why me?
I took this program on because of my former experience teaching UX and building curriculum at General Assembly. I already had a framework to build off of because I had taught multiple 12-week programs as well as trialed General Assembly’s 1-week bootcamp intensive. I saw this an an opportunity to take what worked from both programs durations, and apply it as a complementary education experience within the internship program,
Curriculum Structure
4 modules became the natural grouping of the types of activities and content to engage existing employees without being a burden.
Redwood Academy - aimed to teach interns how to use design systems and how to design as part of a large organization. It gave a history and overview about why Oracle was going through a brand redesign and how the design system was built.
Immersive Bootcamp - This was intended to give every intern regardless of age, background, discipline, or level of experience a small project. Students should walk way from the immersive bootcamp with a base understanding of how to run a user-centered design project.
Core Skill Builders - These workshops are deep dives into a specific area. It created an opportunity for Senior Designers to teach their expertise.
Electives - These workshops were meant to be more advanced topics outside of the core curriculum. It was meant to provide awareness into different disciplines within the Design organization for students to pursue.
Why a 12 week program?
12 weeks is the natural length of an internship.
Why a bootcamp at the beginning?
The first week of an internship is orientation and setup. I chose the second week to run the 1-week immersive bootcamp to:
1. Create a shared bonding experience
2. Establish a baseline set of knowledge that all interns can fall back on
3. Give interns a 1-week project as a preview of what the rest of their internship project would look like.
DESIRED OUTCOMES
At the end of the internship, Interns should walk away with
Real world experience - a better understanding of how work happens in large scale product environments and the tools, design systems, and methods that allow it to happen.
Bootcamp Training - Rather than paying for a third-party training company, they will get it from the source
Portfolio Piece - to showcase the work they completed to help them get their next role.
The Redwood Experience - a take-home working example of how top-tier designs get researched, developed and made.
At the end of the internship, Oracle Design should walk away with
Happy, fulfilled interns - that tell their families and friends about a transformative experience and want to come back to work for Oracle Design.
Benchmark Metrics - that help up better tune our internship education program for future iterations.
Secondary Key Results
Oracle Design can reuse the initial set of content created for interns to on-ramp and train newly hired Full Time Employees as well as portions of the content to run trainings for non-design staff.
Solution
12 Week Core & Elective Series
One Week Intensive Bootcamp
The immersive bootcamp is structured to introduce the User centered design process as well as march them through a project within 1 week.
12 Week Internship Education Program
I structured the core and elective tracks to support where interns may be within their projects. Each workshop dove into either hard skills or provided an opportunity for students ask for help and support.
Designed to supplement the intern’s primary project calendar as well as the Global Internship Program schedule.
Want to Learn More?
Shoot me an email! Let’s discuss your questions, comments, and organizational needs.