Over the years, Virtual Internships have continued to evolve and grow in response to the changing education and work landscape. We're always striving to stay ahead of the curve and provide the best possible experience for our partners and their interns.
As part of that commitment to continuous improvement, we're excited to announce our latest brand refresh. In this blog, we'll take a closer look at our journey so far and explore how our updated brand reflects our values, vision, and goals for the future.
We've updated our look and feel for a new audience experience. With that comes a refreshed identity, website, and platform for our interns, host companies, and partners worldwide. The changes will have a big impact and inevitably help more students kickstart their new and exciting careers, give companies a more diverse and talented remote workforce, and ensure education providers can better prepare their alumni for the working world.
At Virtual Internships, we have our fingers on the pulse within the education arena, we know its pace and trajectory - therefore, how necessary it is to keep evolving. We wanted to distinguish ourselves to make our brand easily recognizable to our audiences outside of our logo, to easily reflect our brand values in the way we look and sound, and to convey consistent messages across all marketing channels.
Importantly, our new brand refresh allows us to speak your language, visually and in writing. It’s in line with how we operate as a company - ambitious and daring to be different, and it won't stop there. Just like the future of work is evolving, so will we.
To move forward, it’s important to look back to see how far we’ve come. We’d like to take this opportunity to showcase the visual evolution of VI since its founding in 2018. Since we began, we've been determined to make internships more accessible with remote placements for students and graduates with companies worldwide.
Check out our brand-new website - which launched this week!
The education industry has seen dramatic changes over the last few years, and our evolved brand reflects both the professionalism of the industry, whilst striving to stay ahead of society's demand for rapidly consuming information and having that capability of stopping the scrollers in their tracks.
Our brand visuals have evolved to include darker tones of black and blue with pops of color in the photography we feature. It’s mature, exciting, and authentic - just like us. Each color represents how we see our audience's personality; positive, full of energy, ambitious, and industrious.
Finally, we wanted to convey that when you choose right, your working life can and should be as vibrant as you are.
Co-founders, Dan Nivern and Ed Holroyd Pearce previously founded a company called CRCC ASIA where they wanted to help students from the UK and the US, and other locations, to get internship experience in Asia, a fast-rising economy, and helped send over 10,000 students to do in-person internship programs in Asia.
On day one, Virtual Internships matched students or recent graduates by hand, placing them into companies thanks to a team of staff building a network of companies and suggesting interns to those companies (and vice versa). Our platform has evolved to be the leading platform with over 250,000 opportunities across 80+ countries, which intelligently and rapidly matches interns with companies all over the world on internship placements aligned with their career goals.
Coaching calls were the first additional “feature” introduced, shortly followed by “CareerBridge” - a learning course built on a third-party Learning Management System (TalentLMS). During this phase, VI had approximately 100 interns across two years.
Things started to take off in early April 2020, and a new leadership team from CRCC Asia was brought into VI.
We knew the remote work movement was coming. Then in 2020, as the working world was forced to scramble to rapidly evolve to a more online model thanks to Covid-19, of course we rose to the challenge. Since those unprecedented pandemic years in human history, which many are still feeling the effects of, it is clear that Covid-19 wasn't only an accelerant for remote work but also remote education.
100 interns, a handful of university partners, and 20 host companies suddenly became more than 1,000 interns, 30 university partners, foundation partners and several thousand host companies in a matter of months. We were growing fast and investors recognized our potential. Our leadership team also recognized the only way to achieve our mission, at scale, was to move from being a service-led business into a tech-enabled product. And so we did.
Throughout it all, however, our core values haven’t changed, and neither has our key mission.
We are proud of where we’ve come from and what we’ve achieved, yet we acknowledge that there are still many hurdles to overcome, and we will continue to evolve as the industry does. For now, and so far:
The future for the world of employment and those looking to dive in seems bright and prosperous.
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