You know how so many companies out there promote big, wonderful values and visions, but hardly ever live it out in their daily workplace practices? These companies hang big values on their office walls for them to collect dust, without employees giving a second thought to actually living out these values. I honestly thought that clickTRUE would be the same, and that all their hype about ‘learning’ and ‘inbound marketing’ was just for show. 

After my 4-week internship, I can tell you with certainty that clickTRUE really practises what they preach. The clickTRUE culture we have here is the perfect environment to facilitate learning, which is really at the core of what clickTRUE values: #alwaysbelearning. Starting from the very first day in clickTRUE, this was the lens that us interns were given. Jereme started off the day by introducing the company values to us, and made sure to engage us in the process by allowing us to think and respond to the things he asked. 

Jereme impressed upon us the importance of soft skills!!! He didn’t just tell us how to use soft skills, he showed us by example, demonstrating how he practised active listening when chatting with us. I really got an insight into how his mind works, how he thinks on a deeper level to interpret the questions I ask and how he varied his pace when addressing us – slowing down to check if we understood. I feel like he gave me an existential crisis, making me want to question everything in the world. There are so so many things to consider, because humans are complex, but that’s the beauty of things. Behind every question asked, there is always a deeper intent, like why are they asking this question, what do they really want to know? And to truly build good relationships and to make people feel heard, the trick is to learn how to find these rarely vocalised intentions. 

I also learnt another thing, which is that schools are not very helpful. Or stringent. What do I mean by this? So when I do my assignments, I rarely ever have to do it more than once, right? Just do it once, then hand in, doing one round of corrections afterwards at most. I was used to having my first draft approved, and maybe that made me a little bit lazy and complacent. Coming to clickTRUE, the first project that the interns worked on had at least 6 drafts before finally getting approval. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad, just took some getting used to. I learnt that needing to do another draft was not the same as being told, “Oh, you did a really sucky job, now go redo it”. Doing another draft was more of a “This is good, but you can make it better by doing this next thing as well”. Continuous refinement is necessary to produce a piece of work that we can really be proud of and say we put in our best effort. #continuousimprovement!!!

One of the things about clickTRUE is that the interns don’t only learn head knowledge, but we are also given the opportunity to put our skills to practical use! One of our assignments was to do up a landing page on clickTRUE’s values and vision. For that, we had to put our soft skills to the test and interviewed the CEO, Jackie, to glean an insight into how clickTRUE decided on their values and mission statements. Not only did we get the backstory we wanted for the landing page, we were also life-coached through his various anecdotes. I think that as a youth myself, having ‘deep talks’ with wise, successful adults really gives me a whole new perspective of life. Here are some of the most eye-opening things I’ve learnt from Jackie.

#1: “Success is a bad teacher. Failure teaches you a lot more.”

At the same time, we must remember to dwell on the issue, not on the person. Avoid blaming, but we should not sweep failures under the carpet either. Failures are precious to the organisation to improve. At the same time, we want failures to be many small ones rather than one big one. Find a one foot hurdle to jump across, not five feet ones.  

#2: “The enemy of a good plan is a perfect plan.” 

We can't ever have a perfect plan. By being too much of a perfectionist, we actually waste time trying to create the perfect plan, and end up not being able to come up with a good plan at all. 

Last but not least, we asked Jackie what his most important takeaway was from managing clickTRUE. I’ll leave you with this quote, because I resonate strongly with what he said.

“Being a part of clickTRUE is a blessing. I get to do what I like with the people I like doing things with.”

Everyone here is passionate about what they do, and this passion is infectious. The culture of the company is really inspiring and the people are incredibly supportive and encouraging. I feel like I'm a part of a team and everyone is always willing to help each other out. The company is constantly growing and evolving, and it's exciting to be a part of that process and to see the positive changes that it brings. The clickTRUE team is vibrant, friendly and loving. One of my core memories here at clickTRUE would be how the team goes out to the nearby coffee shops to dabao our lunch together. After getting food, the team waits for everyone to be accounted for, and then we walk back to clickTRUE together. Most of us eat at the long white table in the pantry, giving off a super homely and cosy vibe! Over lunch, a lot of jokes are cracked and stories are shared, it never gets boring here.

tldr: clickTRUE is a family, you will love, laugh and learn so much here. 

I am grateful and blessed to have been able to spend my December holidays interning with clickTRUE, and I highly recommend this experience to all students out there looking for a meaningful and fun way to grow their portfolio, work experience, and most importantly, grow as a person.