Student Employment Model

Disclaimer: iPOV has no connection to Auburn University other than proximity and a commitment to the Auburn community.

iPOV is located in Auburn, Alabama. Founded in the mid 1990s by Auburn students, alumni, and faculty, interactive Point of View (iPOV) hoped to tap the Internet frenzy. Soon after it started, it shifted focus to look for new ways to author web and video-based training materials. By the time the dot-com bubble burst, iPOV was doing steady work for several Fortune 500 companies.

However, the real story of iPOV concerns our workforce, consisting of more than twenty current and former Auburn students working full and part-time. If you have ever spent time in the “loveliest village on the plains," you know the type of people that work for us. To understand how they fit in, you also need to understand our business.

iPOV’s Service Process

(iPOV’s process is described throughout this website. However, a brief review may help the reader better understand how our process ties into our employment model.)

iPOV’s ‘manufacturing process’ is geared to mass-produce multimedia and eLearning materials. The process evolved after we realized that video is a terrific way to capture information from experts and convey it to others – except that traditional video capture and production methods are too cumbersome and expensive.

As we investigated, we found that the camera was not the problem – the difficulties almost always occured in the dialog. As anyone who has tried to record a video presentation is aware, ordinary people make mistakes when they speak on camera. This is the major cause of re-takes. That’s why conventional video production needs acting ‘talent’. However, if audio is the problem, there is an easy shortcut:

We record expert demonstrations and explanations. These experts are just regular people that understand how to perform a given task. We record the demonstrations (how to use equipment, how to use software, etc.) with inexpensive video equipment. As we record, we apply two rules:
- Aim the camera to focus tightly on the task. Avoid the expert’s face so he or she is never seen speaking on camera.
- Encourage the expert to give a casual, play-by-play commentary – i.e., without any prior scripting or rehearsal. If they mess up a few words, they just keep talking - it doesn’t matter.
Verbal mistakes don’t matter because iPOV will transcribe the audio into a draft script and improve the grammar. Our clients edit the draft scripts and we make a voiceover exactly to the approved script. We discard the original audio.
Ultimately, we deliver good video, a validated script and a word-perfect voiceover. It may not be Hollywood, but it is clear, accurate, and professional.

The process is also fast. Most eLearning developers need 3 or 4 rounds of edits to get the material right. This can take several months. iPOV usually finishes with just one edit cycle. This takes a few weeks. As long as the raw captured video shows the task being done correctly, all derived eLearning materials will also be correct. Since iPOV seldom makes processing mistakes, we can easily handle schedules that would be impossibly short for anyone else.

iPOV’s Student Labor Force

The process is powerful but it is also labor-intensive. That’s intentional. iPOV has found that only humans can make the judgments that drive the process past inevitable problems. For example, iPOV still does manual voice transcription because a human can type speech and improve grammar at the same time. But this approach means that iPOV needs a lot of smart people to:

Apply grammar correctly (we have strict written standards)
Build web sites (we have developed our own software tools)
Process and publish web video
Work with XML and a wide variety of other software applications

The assembly workers in iPOV’s ‘service factory’ are drawn from Auburn’s best and brightest students (see our alumni page) in liberal arts, engineering, business and science. Currently, we have about 20 students and recent graduates on staff. Six are full-time and the rest are part-time. We encourage our student employees to deal directly with customers to manage projects and provide customer service. To get them up to speed, iPOV has developed standards, training and formalized written procedures, to the point that a new worker is usually productive in less than a day.

iPOV's view of Student Labor

iPOV has learned a few things about using Auburn students as a potential workforce. These are lessons that we want to share with others, especially the debunking of some myths that we suspect are widely held:

Twenty-somethings aren’t mature enough to handle complex business situations. Not so! We find that most of our student employees will walk through fire to please a customer. This is especially true when the customer is a manager at a major corporation. We constantly get compliments from our clients about the courtesy and personal service that they have received.
You can’t staff reliably for services because students have to go to class at critical times. Not so! Student schedules vary so widely that you can easily create a manning roster to cover business hours – if you organize your work so one person can quickly hand it off to another.
A student work force is hard to schedule: ‘they will all disappear for spring break.’ Not so! It is our experience that half of our work force do want to go away for spring break (or Christmas, or Thanksgiving) – but the other half want to work extra hours! Our aggregate workforce is surprisingly non-seasonal.
A student work force is flighty or transient. Not so! When we hire a bright sophomore or junior and give them a real challenge, we have a bright employee with steadily growing competence for 2 or 3 years. If they go on to graduate school at Auburn, they’re practically lifers! Match that in a major city!
Auburn is at the far end of the earth. Not so! Our student work force can swim effortlessly through the Web. They can electronically go anywhere and do anything the Internet can offer. Currently, that’s a lot.
You have to be in San Jose or Boston or Raleigh or Austin to be world-class in knowledge work. Not so! We constantly benchmark our services because we have to sell to some of the biggest, savviest companies on earth. Our process, our employees and our work stack up as well as anyone’s – not just in Alabama, not just in the South, not just in the US, but in the world!
Hiring students poses a special management challenge. Absolutely true! You have to manage them for what they are: bright twenty-somethings with a lot more energy and enthusiasm than experience. They mess up in the weirdest ways and then have to work miracles to recover. If your management style can’t adapt, don’t bother trying. But if you can handle it, they are absolutely delightful to be around.
We exploit students because we charge companies a lot more for their time than we pay them. While we respect their opinions, we strongly disagree! Apart from the fact that any business (even one that is fun) has to make a profit, we constantly strive to maintain a fair working contract with our student employees.

Broader Issues

We passionately believe that iPOV’s business model can be applied to other businesses in the burgeoning information economy. This would, in turn, help a lot of deserving students. In fact, iPOV’s experience may impact broader ethical issues:

At iPOV, we believe that the American university student population is the largest pool of low cost, high quality labor on this continent.
On several occasions, iPOV’s normal prices have been benchmarked to be competitive with those of Indian outsourcing companies. Before we outsource knowledge work to Asia, shouldn’t we at least try to insource some of it here?

We have a moral obligation (and possibly naked self interest) to help our undergraduates transition to the work force.
It’s no secret that undergraduate education often fails to prepare students for the workplace. They emerge with memorized facts, but little understanding of the challenges of thinking for a living. At iPOV, we passionately believe that professional service bureaus like ours, in university towns, could fill that gap.

Bottom Line

At iPOV, we are proud of our experiment. We are even more proud of the members of the Auburn student family that make it happen every day.