Tüpraş Continues to Support the Development of Students with Online Internship Program
Following the “Young Talents - Nextremers” Program initiated as a remote working model due to pandemic, Tüpraş has now completed its internship program for university students online.
Tüpraş continued its efforts for the development of university students also during the pandemic through online platforms. The company moved its internship program, which is mostly participated by juniors and seniors every year as a part of their mandatory university internship, to digital environment this year due to the measures against Covid-19. More than 200 students have successfully completed the evaluation that covered 5,660 applications in total and joined the online program in August and September.
More than 60 employees of Tüpraş spent almost 400 hours for the development of students through one-to-one trainings, department presentations, guidance and mentoring support during the program, which was completely managed by internal resources and was full of developmental activities. Furthermore, the students had a chance to meet Tüpraş staff during career and development talks and they asked the questions they wanted to learn about their own career paths. Thanks to this opportunity, the students did also have a chance to take lessons from the experiences of Tüpraş staff before taking their first step towards professional life.
Digital solution suggestions stood out
The students who participated in the program had an opportunity to get to know entire Tüpraş with all of its refineries and functions throughout the program that lasted 4 weeks, starting from the orientation day till the last day. Totally 25 different departments made presentations to students in various areas, ranging from basic refinery operations, such as Production, Processes and Maintenance, to Sales & Marketing, R&D, Data Analytics, Logistics. Interns developed their project ideas specifically for Tüpraş in accordance with Sustainable Development Goals throughout their one month internship period. While training and development, work safety, utilization of energy resources, sustainability, social responsibility and being beneficial for the society were the prominent issues among project ideas, most of these ideas also featured digital solution recommendations.
Mentors and guides, who were volunteers from Tüpraş, met the students in daily and weekly meetings by showing a great support and devotion for the program and with such support of volunteers, development and needs of the students were monitored closely and the experiences they had were improved through regular communication.
“A well designed online internship program makes contribution both for students and the organization.”
Stating that the satisfaction of students from the program was quite high according to the results of surveys conducted to measure the experience, Ahmet Aksoy, Human Resources Director of Tüpraş, said, “We established the communication network with user-friendly platforms that have a strong digital infrastructure. The online internship program, in which development activities were designed in a structured manner, was a good practice not only to introduce our industry and organization, but also our corporate culture as a whole.
These online internship programs provide an environment to reach people and information faster and allows to generate more researches and ideas compared to physical internships. Therefore geographical distances between the cities, where students live or study, and the organizations, in which they want to undertake their internship, would no longer be an obstacle to come together.”
While most of the students had their first remote working experience of their professional work life with Online Internship Program of Tüpraş, they also have developed their competencies by following an approach that is open for learning, researching, being innovative and future oriented. Students from different disciplines, who do not know each other but worked together online for 4 weeks, have shown a good example of dreaming, transforming dreams to ideas, preparing the projects for these ideas and being a team for a common purpose even though they were working remotely.