Co-Op Report: Second Term @ DND

I'm about to finish my second co-op term with the Department of National Defence. As part of my program with school, I'm required to submit a co-op report for each of the three co-op terms I complete.

This is what I submitted after my second term:

Introduction

Our program has three opportunities for co-op placement: the summer of 2014, and the winter and fall of 2015. Because I already have fairly extensive professional work experience, I wanted to take a targeted approach to my co-op placements. I was not looking just for work experience, but rather for work experience that would help me in determining my career path after graduation. There are a surprising number of paths for graduates of our program. Based on talking with graduates I believe the three most common to be: working in some way on ERP systems such as SAP or Oracle, working in logistics or operations management, or working in procurement. Beyond this, and especially if I stay in Ottawa, there is also the question of working with the government vs. working with a private company.

In the summer of 2014 I took a co-op placement with DND to work in procurement within the ADM (Mat) section. As I will detail below I then went to work for the ADM (IM) section in a technical role. In my second co-op term, having made the decision that I will be targeting a career working on ERP systems, I decided to return to DND in that technical role.

This report will give a quick overview of my time with DND, provide background information about DND and the ADM (IM) section that I worked with, the type of work that I performed and how that work related to our program and my learning objectives, and will offer suggestions for students who might want to work in a similar role in the future.

Interview / Application Process

I started with DND during the first co-op term (Summer 2014). At the time I was hired to work with the procurement department. After two months I was able to transition into working with the DRMIS Materials Management team in a technical role. This aligned more closely with our program objectives and with my own skillset.

I was invited to stay on with that team on a part-time basis through the fall of 2014, and I subsequently returned for this, my second co-op term. I made that decision for three reasons: because I had only spent two months with the group, I felt there was more that I could learn and accomplish, because the location is very close to home and helps with work / life balance (I have primary custody of a six year old who goes to school nearby; even though co-op opportunities are about setting oneself up for the future, I have practical considerations to keep in mind at all times), and because I was studying to take the GMAT, and between that, work, and school I felt like I had enough on my plate during the fall semester without starting an extensive job hunt.

Working with DND – ADM (IM)

While with ADM (IM) I worked with the DRMIS Material Management Team. Their role is to support the Material Management components within DRMIS. This includes responding to user incidents, developing training materials, and assisting with the development of system changes among other things.

My role with the DRMIS MM Team has been to assist wherever necessary. Over the past four months my time has mostly been spent either developing technical documentation, or assisting team members on specific short term projects, as required.

The technical documents I worked on were mostly work instructions of how to perform specific transactions (Business Processes) using one of the several interfaces DND uses to interact with SAP. As a result I gained familiarity with a number of SAP transactions that I would not otherwise have seen, and was able to really build on my knowledge of SAP. I also created the actual technical documentation using a program known as UPerform. Working on technical documentation thus aligns closely with my “Technical Skills” goal to “further develop expertise with SAP and other DND-specific software”. While developing or re-working the documentation, I was also able to use writing skills that I had prior to joining our program, but which I developed further in our program’s various English courses.

While developing technical documentation I worked closely with two permanent team members and one other student to map out the business process for the maintenance of technical documentation. I also developed and populated a spreadsheet to track our progress for documentation maintenance. This aligns with my “Communication, thinking, and learning goal” of “improve communication skills by working closely with other staff members”, as well as my “Teamwork” goal to “work closely with other co-op students, contractors, and DND staff to accomplish day to day goals”.

In addition to developing technical documentation I spent time working with team members on various small DRMIS projects. These involved me using SAP to create, modify, or display data, as well as to extract that data for further analysis. The analysis was done in excel, and involved VBA scripting. This work aligned with my learning objectives for “Objectives and Goals”, which were to “accomplish tasks that help improve the day to day functioning of DND” and to “improve my technical skills”. Because I worked with multiple team members on varying projects, and also had an ongoing documentation role, I was also able to accomplish my “Working Habits” learning objective to “further develop my ability to multi-task and improve my goal prioritization”.

Some of this work is ongoing, and I will be returning to work with this group on a part-time basis during the Summer 2015 school semester.

Takeaways / Suggestion for Future Students - ADM (IM)

My biggest takeaways are that I like systems work, and that I think I could be very good at a career based around this type of work, and probably make very good money doing it. The day to day work can be very interesting. I am not sure, however, that I see myself working in the public sector for the course of my career. The sheer size of DND necessitates a level of bureaucracy that I find myself uncomfortable navigating, and the pace of change can be glacially slow. I think this has been an excellent opportunity to develop my skills however, and I’m very appreciative of it. I look around the office and as I write this I know of at least 10 people on my floor alone who have graduated from, or who are currently attending, our program. This speaks very highly of both the skills we acquire and the network we have available to us, if we choose working on SAP as our career path.

For future students, knowledge of SAP is critical. While I did not use many of the transactions I would have seen in school, the ability to navigate SAP and to know what the shortcut keys are and how to change options and settings, was essential. Personally, I also found that being able to work with excel to manipulate data was incredibly useful, and given that one of the tasks I had was to develop technical documentation, a strong understanding of writing principles also served me very well.

I would recommend technical work at DND for any co-op students who aspire to a career working on ERP systems post-graduation, and I would recommend students from our program with a high level of demonstrated technical ability to my contacts at DND looking for co-op students.