Reflecting on a Market Research Internship at Captec.

Hello, my name is Thomas. I’m a French business school student. As part of my studies, I was encouraged to do an internship abroad. I decided to choose the UK and successfully applied for a six month market research position at Captec. The time has flown by and now my time at Captec is coming to an end, I’d like to take the opportunity to reflect on what was an interesting, enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Market research

What does a market research internship involve you ask? Well, it’s a bit of everything really. The key thing is being able to understand what you need to find. Usually at Captec, that meant looking at a new product, applications it might be used in, potential customers, the market size, competitors and overall market trends. The goal is to determine if the market has a problem that needs solving and whether your product can address those needs and be the solution the industry has been waiting for.

On the whole, the day-by-day was very research oriented – as expected. It allowed me to sharpen my analytical skills by understanding and summarising vast amounts of research into short presentations. As the nature of projects varies greatly at Captec, I had to be open to new ideas and concepts. One day I might be researching the in-vehicle tablet market for mobile workforces, the next looking into machine vision embedded boxes for automation applications. This is just one of the reasons I’d recommend an internship at Captec, the exposure to a wide range of projects is something really quite interesting and it keeps you on your toes!

This internship also allowed me to learn more about the business world itself. While doing research, I learned about B2B relationships, supply chains, system integration and technological trends that will help shape the future of the world such as machine vision, IoT, industry 4.0 and edge computing. What’s great is that this knowledge isn’t specific to one sector or one market. I worked on projects for several different industries: energy, healthcare, transport, automation, defence, gaming, telecommunications and mobile workforces. This knowledge is definitely going to be of use for me later on in my studies and on the job market.

Business processes

As a market researcher at Captec, you will be an integral part of the product management team. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about product development and about the technical aspects of computing. You will have the opportunity to work with other departments, sales and marketing mainly. You will also learn about every department in the company through inductions at the beginning of the internship. This helped me understand the big picture. I enjoyed that and found it very useful. I definitely learnt a lot from it.

The business and the people

I didn’t know much about computer technology before I took the position. That wasn’t a problem though. It didn’t prevent me from doing my job and it made the whole experience much more interesting; there was always something new to learn or to discover.

There are over 100 people working at Captec. During my time, I managed to meet most of them and had very positive interactions with  everyone I encountered. The people were nice and smart; they know what they’re talking about and everyone strives to achieve the best results possible. It was interesting discussing issues in meetings and trying to find the best solutions together.

At Captec, you can speak your mind. Opinions are valued and taken into account as much as possible. Moreover, people understand that even if you are working hard and doing your work seriously, you can do it with a smile, a positive attitude and have some occasional laughs. This might seem exaggerated, too good to be true etc. I had two previous work experiences before Captec. Out of the three, this was definitely the best one in that regard.

Nothing is perfect – by definition, it can’t be. That being said, my internship at Captec is everything I hoped for: a challenging and an enjoyable learning experience. I got a lot more out of this internship than just learning how to do market research. The same would be true for you, should you choose to join Captec as a market researcher.