8 ways the COVID-19 pandemic has made internships more inclusive

By William Brackenridge

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended economies, work habits, thrown families into poverty, and forced social disruption in almost every country.

It has resulted in more than one million deaths worldwide. Similar to World War II for our grandparents, COVID-19 is the calamity of this generation. But even in World War II, technologies spearheaded remarkable growth in human quality of life up to that date. While COVID-19 is horrible, it has triggered social and technological initiatives.

One example of this is business internships. In the past, already-privileged youth leveraged their parents’ power and influence. This has changed since the pandemic started. Internships are now more inclusive and will likely stay this way after the pandemic.

1. The telework exodus

Before COVID-19, the idea of a teleworking intern was laughable. Working from home was something only individual employees were allowed after years of work, service, and building trust from management. Even as more and more evidence poured in that telework was better for both companies and employees, we insisted people come to the office.

Under COVID-19 restrictions, we discovered many jobs could be performed at home — and that a lot of us not only like it better but are more productive. This applied to interns as well in companies that kept their interns working during the lockdowns.

How does this increase inclusivity? Being able to intern from home opens the opportunity to a far broader population, including people with child care needs, disabilities, and those without reliable transportation. It eliminates a broad spectrum of barriers that previously kept candidates out.

2. A shift in focus

Years ago, the main reason employers hosted internships was to get work done at a low cost. However, research suggests the purpose has shifted toward identifying future talent. More and more companies that once considered interns as resources to be expended now consider them investments to be grown with the company.

A shift toward inclusivity can accompany this shift in treatment. When a company views interns as nothing more than cheap or free labor, there’s little incentive to view an internship program with an eye toward inclusivity and fairness. As interns become critical members of organizations, those factors grow in importance.

Although this change started before COVID-19, it’s likely the general reassessment of corporate priorities, culture, and practice will impact this shift as well. The overall trend toward inclusion, diversity, and fairness will likely continue as the world returns to work.

3. More real work

In most offices, interns complete menial tasks like fetching coffee, making photocopies, and running errands. Although many consider this a rite of passage, it meant interns gained little in the way of on-point work experience.

During COVID-19, interns are completing real work. There’s no coffee to fetch or dry cleaning to deliver when everybody is working from home. Instead, interns get assignments to move real projects forward, giving them the hands-on experience that makes internships truly valuable.

This shift makes internships more inclusive by changing the selection criteria from the intern’s point of view. Having the luxury to spend a year doing menial work for low or no pay is only available to a small number of people who probably don’t need the help. If internships include meaningful work experience, it becomes a realistic option for a broader range of candidates.

4. Less networking, more mentorship

Being an intern never paid enough to justify the expenditure of time and effort alone, but it offered the benefit of networking. By spending time in the same office as experienced staff in a business or field, the intern got a chance to make connections that could further their career.

Under COVID-19 restrictions, interns aren’t spending time with those connections. Although this could be seen as a loss for them, it has evolved into something more valuable. Instead of casual break room contact with multiple officemates, interns receive deep and meaningful mentorship from a handful of co-workers. It replaces several surface-level connections with a handful of quality relationships.

Superficial networking benefits those who already have an established network of connections, and interns without that net gain less from experience. By contrast, the closer mentoring involved in telework internships is precisely the kind of relationship that best serves outsiders who want to break ground in a new career.

5. Lower costs

Low-paid interns must cover the costs of their daily commute, lunches, and other expenses of reporting to an office. One of the chief reasons many people wind up in an easier job than the career they wanted is because an internship would have cost them too much.

The COVID-19-driven advent of virtual internships reduces the cost of becoming an intern. Yes, interns might need to upgrade their home workstation and internet access, but all other expenses are no longer a factor. Becoming an intern requires less financial investment and is thus an option for more people.

Whether or not post-COVID-19 employers will continue to offer virtual internships remains to be seen. Still, even if they do not, they may very well change some policies to continue making internships more affordable.

6. A smaller window

This past summer, many companies reduced the number of interns or canceled their internship programs entirely, leaving fewer internships available overall. 

When many internship opportunities exist, the temptation to give a slot to your manager’s nephew or somebody from your old fraternity can be pretty intense. The job doesn’t pay much, so what harm can the wrong candidate do?

When internship opportunities are limited, it becomes essential to make sure the candidates for internships are the best-qualified and most likely to continue work if offered full employment. Those candidates are more likely to come from diverse, inclusive backgrounds than from a pool of people with existing connections.

7. A wider net

The traditional pipelines for finding interns have been colleges, family and friends of existing employees, and limited searches to the general public. These are far from inclusive by nature and are further limited by geography. Candidates had to live within a reasonable drive of the home office.

Although the pipelines haven’t changed very much, the telework revolution of COVID-19 is removing geographical limitations. Interning positions aren’t open only to those in the same or surrounding zip codes, but to anywhere with an internet connection.

That by itself makes internships more inclusive. And it’s possible that, in coming years, this could also erode the closed nature of intern recruitment, opening doors beyond those with an already-privileged connection. Time will tell.

8. Consistent, ubiquitous reassessment

Many business practices have continued for no better reasons than that they’re how we’ve always done things. Internships followed the same patterns as ever, including nepotism, institutional racism, and sexism. In most cases, nobody continued these unfair hiring practices on purpose — they just kept doing what they were taught to do.

COVID-19 has forced us to reassess so many assumptions about how we do business, how we interact with our co-workers, and even what we consider most important. This reassessment has trickled into internships as leaders become more open-minded about everything their company does. The end result is companies moving away from old, less-inclusive models and into new modes. Some of these models will be explicitly designed for greater inclusion, while others will simply be more inclusive as a side effect of their core reasons for the change. In both cases, the result is better for everybody.

Final thought: The big if

Although all of the changes we discussed above are playing out in real time as the pandemic continues, we still have the uncertainty of what happens once things return to normal. It’s possible the changes to internships specifically (and business in general) will stay even after everybody returns to work. It’s also possible most companies will return to how they did business before, with management and many employees craving the old normal as a way of embracing the end of a terrifying year.

Most likely, the result will be something in between those extremes.

— William Brackenridge is a Kentucky-based writer. He has two children who are college students vying for internships this year.