Speaker: Nicky Garcea, President, Cappfinity
Please state your full name, title, organization, and the award name.
Nicky Garcea: Hi, my name is Nicky Garcea, and I am the co-founder and president here at Cappfinity, and we are delighted to have won the NACE Excellence Award.
Talk briefly about your program and what sparked you to develop it.
Nicky Garcea: Our award relates to our work with EY, where we delivered a five week technology internship program: a hybrid program, developed using virtual reality and coaching from the business. And every intern was provided with a VR headset, which they used to receive program content and work with other interns across the country.
What were you trying to achieve? Did you achieve what you expected?
Nicky Garcea: The EY internship program sought to see if you could use virtual reality to deliver new content and to differentiate technology internship experience. It achieved this in many ways with interns reporting that they felt more confident in handling clients and their managers also reporting an increase in the quality of their work, post the five week program.
Were there any surprises—any results you weren’t expecting?
Nicky Garcea: There are a couple of results that surprised us about this program. One being that the interns enjoyed collaborating using virtual reality with interns across different offices. And we also saw an increase with 82% of interns saying that they thought the EY was a tech-centric firm.
How did you develop this program? What processes did you use?
Nicky Garcea: We built this program in partnership with the EY technology business, thinking about the skills that are going to be required over the next five years within technology. And we use this as a foundation for all of the components that we built in virtual reality, so that the interns learned these skills and then could demonstrate them at the end when they went through one client project.
From your perspective, what was the single most important outcome of this program?
Nicky Garcea: Up to this point, it wasn't always possible for interns historically to have a similar experience. But by using virtual reality, we were able to give every single technology intern the opportunity to grow their confidence and their skills on a client project. With every single intern saying post the VR experience, their confidence had grown.
If someone wants to replicate your program, what do they need to know upfront (the first steps to take, potential pitfalls to watch for)?
Nicky Garcea: If you wanted to replicate this program, I would say, look at the future skills that are required by interns, and then build out your programmatic experience across a number of weeks, thinking how you can develop those skills over time, and then apply them to a real life project. That's what we did using virtual reality, but you wouldn't need VR to replicate that experience. And if you did use VR, it's not as complicated as you might think.
