The Five Elements of Internship Success
The best internship program will not succeed with the wrong interns. Likewise, having the best interns is pointless if you fail to fully utilize and develop their talents and skills, or leave them disappointed and disillusioned. The Internship Institute’s Blueprint for Internship Success provides employers with every insight about proven practices. Here are five of the key elements to make an internship successful.
1. Commitment starts with internal buy-in. Company executives must promote an organizational culture that values students’ abilities and contributions. Putting commitment to work requires the means to build your internship program with the proper structure. You will need to:
- Budget for program costs such as campus recruiting, technology tools and compensation;
- Allocate proper staff resources and allot them time to manage the program; and
- Invest in the one-time cost and effort to develop program resources to support effective hiring, orientation, training, evaluation and sustained improvement.
2. Planning begins with taking a comprehensive work inventory well ahead of time. Among other things, this project pipeline is what defines recruitment goals, program metrics, resource needs, budgeting, and sets the stage to make interns most productive.
3. Ownership is about making someone accountable for all aspects of the internship program. This person should be fully qualified to supervise students and be innately motivated to do his/her best for the organization and interns alike. Avoid assigning this responsibility to novice managers. This individual should possess at least two years of supervision and project management experience.
4. Engagement is about commitment in action to recruit and manage interns most effectively. Apply the same standards and diligence as you do to recruit full-time employees, especially if hiring them upon graduation is an ultimate goal of your program. Start by identifying two to three schools close by that have academic programs to match your criteria. Forge relationships. Seek guidance from career services professionals and faculty advisors who have an inside track. Make personal connections within alumni associations, and student organizations that match your business needs.
5. Development means going beyond “on-the-job-training” to balance productive work assignments with opportunities for growth. The sooner you train students to be more capable, the sooner they can apply that competency to be more productive. Lectures, textbooks or tests can never substitute for the hands-on experience your organization can provide.
— Matthew Zinman founded The Internship Institute to make internships THE solution to close the gap between school and work. He has created several internship staffing management products to make it as easy as possible for employers to create the best program. These solutions include: The Blueprint for Internship Success, a supervisor training video (DVD) of proven best practices, the Intern Toolkit with step-by-step resources and downloadable templates, and The Intern Supervisor Guidebook to improve where the internship experience truly happens: one-on-one. These solutions combine his experience managing more than 200 student interns with his passion to make a difference. The professionalism of these products reflect his expertise in communication management and business strategy consulting to nearly 100 companies since 1989. He is a frequent lecturer and author about related topics.
