Summer - Strategic Foresight Intern

About the job

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  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.

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 way finding 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.

• 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.

• 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…