The Intern was released in the US on 25 September 2015. The film tells the story of Ben Wyckert’s return to the workplace after retirement as an intern for a fashion website created by Jules Austin, and from it do we see how to be a workplace person.
The Intern is a comedy film distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, directed by Nancy Meyers and co-starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro. The film was released in the US on 25 September 2015. The film tells the story of Ben Wyckert, who returns to the workplace after retirement and becomes an intern at the fashion website created by Jules Austen.
Although the film is called “The Intern”, it is not strictly about how a group of young interns enter the workforce as we think of it. It’s about an internet start-up company’s ‘Senior Intern’ programme, which is supposed to recruit a few older (over 65) interns to balance out the all-young people in the company. The aim was to balance the company’s all-young people. So, the intern played by the film’s hero is actually a 70-year-old grandfather.
Although the film is not a workplace promotion story, it does explain a lot about how a newcomer to the workplace should integrate quickly into the team and express himself fully.
The first thing a newcomer should do is to get along with his or her team members. After more than 40 years in traditional manufacturing, Ben, a 70-year-old gentleman, joins a new trendy women’s e-commerce company as a trainee in a big way. The job.
Although Ben had no idea what a women’s e-commerce company was all about at first, he had been in the workplace for decades and knew a lot about the workplace, so even though he was unfamiliar with the business it didn’t stop him from fitting in. He is surrounded by colleagues nearly 50 years younger than him, but he treats them with honesty and sincerity, such as guiding a young colleague who has had a fight with his girlfriend on how to win her back, providing accommodation for an intern who has been kicked out of her home, helping a mute engineer change his image, assisting the boss’s assistant who is under pressure to do her job properly, etc. He soon becomes a “popular person” throughout the company. He soon became the “man of the hour” in the company.
Because the 70-year-old Ben has a lot of experience in the workplace, he is able to help these colleagues with ease in a way that a newcomer to the workplace might not be able to do, but it’s not hard to see the point of integrating quickly into the team. Most of the time you don’t need to answer people’s questions like in a movie, you just need to show that you are genuine and not close yourself off or even feel out of place in the environment, and I believe you will soon fit in with the team.
Newcomers to the workplace have to learn to start with the little things. Although Ben was already a VP before he retired, he was only a trainee in his new company. His past work experience did not come in handy in his new environment, plus he had not yet figured out how the company worked or what his boss expected of him, so he started with very small things. For example, taking the clothes to the dry cleaners for the lady boss, cleaning the desk in the middle of the office which is full of clutter, being a daily driver for the lady boss, buying food, even taking her daughter to kindergarten, etc.
Newcomers to the workplace are generally not assigned very important things because you are not experienced enough and your abilities have not been recognised enough for you to take on important projects, otherwise there is a relatively high risk, so it actually makes sense to arrange for you to do something simple, basic and trivial. But some people will have their eyes on the prize and will instinctively feel that they are doing odd jobs, thus believing that they are not valued, feeling aggrieved and even starting to resist. In fact, if everyone really works until retirement they will probably have to work for at least 30 years, and doing something small at the beginning of your career is not something that will delay your career, it is important to show your ability from these basic things and let your superiors find out.
In the film, for example, the desk in the middle of the office, which is full of clutter, is never cleaned and the lady boss nags her about it every day, but none of the staff come and go, and only Ben gets up early in the morning to clean it up. He was always on time and knew the easiest route to take, even steady enough to let his boss take a nap in the car and buy him a soup while he waited without eating. Just simply getting the little things done is a different concept to getting them done perfectly.
Newcomers to the workplace have to be good at taking the opportunity to work proactively. If one just sulks and works passively, there is certainly little chance of being found out by simply settling for what has been assigned. In fact when Ben was assigned to his female boss as an intern at the beginning, she said she would assign him work via email, but Ben kept checking his email inbox for days on end and didn’t see any email from his boss. So he started to pay attention to his boss’s schedule. By chance he found out that his boss’s driver was not in shape at work and even stole alcohol. Out of concern for his boss’s personal safety, he asked his driver to take the initiative to explain the situation to his boss, and later he officially became his boss’s car driver.
In fact, the aforementioned cleaning of the rubbish pile in the office is also a sign of seizing the opportunity to get the boss’s favour. Such work is not assigned by superiors, but requires one to have a good eye for detection. If you have the ability to do a good job, you should seize the opportunity to do it well, any team will like a proactive person.
Good at seizing opportunities is in the premise of doing one’s own job, to be assigned to do their best work first, and then see what kind of team work they can take on, or to help their superiors to solve the headache, rather than their own work at hand are not yet done to think about their own performance, which is the practice of putting the cart before the horse.
Newcomers to the workplace need to keep learning. In today’s rapidly changing knowledge, daily learning, lifelong learning has been the trend, the fastest way is to learn on the job, with colleagues, peers to learn. Ben is 70 years old and the women’s e-commerce website is something completely new to him. Many of the things his colleagues around him do, the items they use, their work habits and company culture are also completely new to him. But he doesn’t let this deter him from learning to make himself fit for his job, instead of feeling too old to keep up with the times.
Ben has also learned to extend his previous work experience to his new role. For example, he used to be responsible for selling paper phone books, but women’s e-commerce selling women’s clothing is essentially sales, so he took the initiative to learn about it and analysed the data to conclude that the company was investing a lot of advertising money in a market with limited growth. As a result of this move, he was once again rewarded by his boss and began assisting his assistant with the more core aspects of the business.
What you learn in school is not always directly applicable to the job. New industry knowledge and the tools and skills that need to be acquired are so endless that if you stop learning, you will always be a newcomer. Even an experienced person will gradually become obsolete if he or she stops learning.
Newcomers to the workplace have to be brave enough to solve problems. Being good at seizing opportunities is to take the initiative on something you have full confidence and ability in, while being brave in solving problems is to dare to take on a job that has some degree of difficulty. Such a job is not necessarily something you ask for on your own initiative, but may be a difficult task assigned to you by your supervisor. The supervisor usually does not intentionally make things difficult for a newcomer, so try not to back down and do your best in this situation.
The female boss sent an email to her mother by mistake because she was busy, so she arranged for Ben and three other people to find a way to delete it so that her mother wouldn’t see it after work and the two of them would be at odds. Ben leads the team into the boss’s mother’s home, finds the laptop and deletes the email, and escapes when the police catch up with him. This is of course a comedic aspect of the film, but the moral is to be bold enough to help your superiors solve their problems.
Being trusted with difficult jobs is a form of trust, and if you choose to run away at all times rather than look for solutions, that trust will fade away and you’ll be stuck doing simple, basic jobs in the long run.
Newcomers to the workplace need to know the rules. This is a very easy to be ignored aspect, the workplace is different from school, each company has a distinct culture, each team has a unique atmosphere, each superior has their own habits, as a newcomer to the workplace if not to understand these, it is easy to hit the nail. Knowing the rules is not about learning the ways of the world, but about making yourself more presentable in the workplace.
Ben knows the rules of the workplace so well that when he first joined the company he asked his boss’s assistant what he needed to know about talking to his boss, and the answer he got was to “blink”, “be very punctual”, “be brief and concise “Be concise”, etc. He also takes the initiative to ask her if she wants to close the office door after the conversation with the boss, knows to leave after ringing the doorbell when he goes to pick up the boss from work, and pays special attention to the boss’s privacy, defending his image in public, etc.
There was an interesting episode where the office was empty at night and his colleague asked him why he hadn’t left yet and his reply was that he couldn’t leave before his boss. Such thinking may not be acceptable to the younger generation in the workplace today, but it is something he has learned over his 40 years in the business and it is an office rule that he takes for granted. It is also the fact that he knows these rules, which we think are “unspoken rules”, that has allowed him to achieve the position of VP in his previous workplace experience and to become a trusted friend of his boss in a new and unfamiliar work environment in a short time.
All in all, a movie is a movie, and all the plotting and character relationships are meant to be watchable and emotionally engaging, but the workplace lessons behind the story are worth learning.
