Morris @ Linney

My work placement at Linney has been a very positive experience. I was welcomed into a driven and immensely friendly ‘Insight’ team as if I was a fellow colleague. They allowed me the first week or so to settle in, meet and greet, and learn a few new skills to help me over the remainder of the internship.

Things I’ve learned about Linney

Most of the business activity I was exposed to requires a personal relationship between an account manager and a client (without these relationships, Linney would presumably be out of work). 

• Everything I’ve done has involved Excel at some point.
• Coffee Sessions: Each month, someone gives a presentation about any new advancement in an area of possible interest to the company. I went to two: one on Game Theory and another on the UK economy. These sessions are aimed to keep employees inspired/informed on current events - great idea.
• Work at Linney is organised in a specific way. Project managers allocate specifically how many hours a person must be designated for a specific task within a larger project. 

First major task

McDonald’s are the parent company of McCafe, a relatively new coffee chain, and Linney are a close client of McDonald’s. I was given a sample of over 4000 participants who, amongst other questions, were asked what they thought of various coffee brands (McCafe included). I was assigned with the task of translating the data into something meaningful for McCafe. I wrote a report to explain any important discoveries.

One particular finding that I believed was worth reporting on was part of a linear regression model I created in Rstudio. The above estimate for the ‘Age’ coefficient suggests that the older a participant was, the more negative they were about McCafe. 

What I've learned

• Techniques to clean data and produce and use pivot tables in Excel.
• Methods for trimming and cleaning data to produce useful data sets in Rstudio. 

Something I should have expected is the use of jargon. Two examples I’ve heard most frequently:

• KPI: key performance indicator - specific and measurable details that ‘indicate’ how well an objective is being fulfilled eg a social media KPI could be how many profiles a particular post reaches (from one of the client’s accounts).
• NPD: new product development - the complete process of creating an idea for a product, producing the product and bringing the product to the market to be sold.