Summer 2024- Strategic Foresight Intern - 90361164

https://careers.amtrak.com/job/Summer-2024-Strategic-Foresight-Intern-90361164/1095522300/

Date: Nov 7, 2023

Location: US 

Company: Amtrak

Your success is a train ride away!

As we move America’s workforce toward the future, Amtrak connects businesses and communities across the country. We employ more than 20,000 diverse, energetic professionals in a variety of career fields throughout the United States. The safety of our passengers, our employees, the public and our operating environment is our priority, and the success of our railroad is due to our employees.

Are you ready to join our team?

Our values of ‘Do the Right Thing, Excel Together and Put Customers First’ are at the heart of what matters most to us, and our Core Capabilities, ‘Building Trust, Accountability, Effective Communication, Customer Focus, and Proactive Safety & Security’ are what every employee needs to know and do to be most impactful at Amtrak. By living the Amtrak values, focusing on our capabilities, and actively embracing and fostering diverse ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives, together we will honor our past and make Amtrak a company of the future.

POSITION SUMMARY:
As a Strategic Foresight Intern, you’ll report to the Director of Strategic Foresight as a member of the Innovation team residing within the Digital Technology department.

You are an explorer, researcher, technologist, and dot-connector who helps our organization discover and define emerging trends in the world around us, to seek new opportunities for our innovation team to address. This work is at the heart of our innovation process and critical to empowering teams to deliver differentiated and rewarding experiences.

You will work with other design researchers, futures thinkers, and technologists to envision and craft experiences that ultimately lead to the transformation of public transportation in the U.S. This entails creating insights reports and design thinking tools that guide our future products, platforms, and services that can scale across our nation-wide network. Innovation efforts may range from designing a personalized wayfinding ecosystem to envisioning the sustainable train station of the future.

Your work involves analyzing our operating environment, social and behavioral trends, emerging technologies and their potential usefulness, defining value propositions for new ideas, and helping to define success criteria for new solutions. You’ll also ride the rails doing research with customers and employees; help facilitate workshops with community members; and synthesize, organize, and map information solo.

Key to your success will be a positive spirit, the ability to effectively collaborate, and a relentless drive to re-imagine the future of passenger rail.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Collaborate with customers, community members, and/or stakeholders to drive the analysis of current services and the design of improved services and new solutions.
• Uncover business and user needs through research, develop deep insights, generate concepts, and craft how people will interact with the products and services we create.
• Frame and tell the story of future solutions and present the communication of research findings, conceptual ideas, success criteria, and value propositions both verbally and visually.
• Analyze how policies, interpersonal dynamics, history, and organizational structure impact public perception and utilization of public transportation.
• Support in writing and publishing a variety of insights documents and touchpoints including trend reports, internal blog posts, and more.
• Be an Amtrak ambassador, attending and helping to plan studio and community events, workshops, and conferences.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• Actively pursuing a degree at an accredited educational institution
• Actively pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree in Innovation Management, Strategic Foresight, Service Design, Product Design, Interaction Design, Psychology, Sociology, Economics, or a comparable discipline
• At least 2 years of academic undergraduate studies completed or a junior status at minimum.
• A cumulative GPA of 2.8 or higher
• Familiarity with a range of business strategy/service design approaches, e.g. design research, value proposition development, prioritization methods, road-mapping, etc.
• Proficiency in creating service blueprints, journey maps, ecosystem maps, personas, storyboards, process flows, or other persuasion and alignment documents
• Experience with requirements gathering and communication between design teams, workstreams, and client partners
• Experience using a variety of methods to communicate findings and proposals, including presentations, prototypes, storyboards, and visual frameworks
• Strong attention to detail and ability to partner with stakeholders
• Self-starter with an entrepreneurial spirit
• Familiarity with strategic foresight and speculative design concepts

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experience with planning, designing, facilitating, and synthesizing workshops
• Ability to communicate the big picture to decision makers and the complex details to technical and subject matter experts
• Experience strategically incorporating research into the innovation process and familiarity with a variety of research methodologies
• Experience bridging digital and physical products and services
• Experience with strategic foresight tools and methodologies

COMMUNICATION AND INTERPERSONAL SKILLS:
Must have excellent oral and written communication skills

The hourly range is $17.50 per hour - $35.00 per hour. Pay is based on factors including school year, program of study, etc.  In addition paid internships include Amtrak rail pass privileges as a part of the experience along with one (1) PTO day per academic year.

Please be advised that the Summer 2024 internship program will run from May 20th - August 9th.

Requisition ID:160300
Posting Location(s):Delaware; Pennsylvania
Job Family/Function:Information Technology 
Relocation Offered:No 
Travel Requirements:0 - 5% 
 

You power our progress through your performance.
 

We want your work at Amtrak to be more than a job. We want your career at Amtrak to be a fulfilling experience where you find challenging work, rewarding opportunities, respect among colleagues, and attractive compensation. Amtrak maintains a culture that values high performance and recognizes individual employee contributions. 

Amtrak is committed to a safe workplace free of drugs and alcohol. All Amtrak positions requires a pre-employment background check that includes prior employment verification, a criminal history check and a pre-employment drug screen. 

Candidates who test positive for marijuana will be disqualified, regardless of any state or local statute, ordinance, regulation, or other law that legalizes or decriminalizes the use or possession of marijuana, whether for medical, recreational, or other use. Amtrak's pre-employment drug testing program is administered in accordance with DOT regulations and applicable law.  

In accordance with DOT regulations (49 CFR § 40.25), Amtrak is required to obtain prior drug and alcohol testing records for applicants/employees intending to perform safety-sensitive duties for covered Department of Transportation positions. If an applicant/employee refuses to provide written consent for Amtrak to obtain these records, the individual will not be permitted to perform safety-sensitive functions.

In accordance with federal law governing security checks of covered individuals for providers of public transportation (Title 6 U.S.C. §1143), Amtrak is required to screen applicants for any permanent or interim disqualifying criminal offenses. 

Note that any education requirement listed above may be deemed satisfied if you have an equivalent combination of education, training and experience.

Amtrak is an EOE/Affirmative Action Minority/Female employer, and we welcome all to apply. We consider candidates regardless of race/color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions), national origin/ethnicity, age, disability (intellectual, mental and physical), veteran status, marital status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, genetic information, citizenship or any other personal characteristics protected by law.