The IVEA internship, with the help of the course, was crucial and essential for me to give wings so that I could traverse into new paths, open new doors, explore and discover new talents.
I was having trouble finding my first job when it was suggested that I enroll in the course offered by the Portuguese Autism Federation. Overall in this course, and in my condition, I was reviewing details and characteristics, and a few of them were of great importance to me, which were about shyness and social interactions. The Federation managed to get me an internship at El Corte Inglés, originally for three months, but fortunately extended to six months. The extension of the internship was helped by the course dealing with the topics mentioned above. Those two things have been, somewhat, a negative part of me ever since I remember. With the right steps during the course, accompanied by my willingness to improve myself, I have succeeded in becoming more interactive with my work colleagues, as well as with my internship mentor. My interaction with them has given great positive results, which were seen especially during work assignments, during lunch break and the occasional morning and afternoon breaks.
Ultimately, this improvement of my person, both personally and professionally, has made me more comfortable around the work environment and fellow workers, because I have developed both hard skills, such as learning to work on unknown computer platforms and practicing on MS Excel which was a program I wanted to master, and soft skills, particularly of professional versatility and flexibility. In the last sessions of the course, which coincided with my last two months in El Corte Inglés, I met an old acquaintance who spoke of a job vacancy in BNP Paribas Bank, in the Colombo Mall, and gave me the needed preparations for two upcoming interviews: the first with the Human Resources and the second with the Team Manager and Team Leader of my current team. I believe that my internship in El Corte Inglés was a major factor that enabled me to be accepted in BNP Paribas (coupled with other characteristics, such as my multicultural and bilingual background), in the end of March 2020, though I only began to work in June 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The internship, with the help of the course, was crucial and essential for me to give wings so that I could traverse into new paths, open new doors, explore and discover new talents.
