Internships: What We Wish Employers Knew

What We Wish Employers Knew About Internships

Employers and staff are often hesitant or resistant to the idea of training interns, especially new graduates or students. Remember Emily’s hilarious comments in The Devil Wears Prada? Four items below might change employers’ minds.

1) Productivity

Sure, for a few weeks, you’ll be pulled away from your desk to train the newbies (PathMatchsays new employees average 33.5 hours of training). But after that, students start contributing and producing work product that matters. And once they feel comfortable enough to bring you their own ideas? That is when the magic begins. If you can set up a long-term program like we did at BTTF (sophomores, juniors, seniors), over time our students trained each other as they moved up the ranks.

2) Positive Energy

For seven years, whenever the student team(s) would arrive in the pm, it was like hitting the reset button. Just when our staff was getting droopy, their burst of positive energy would jolt everyone back in action.

If we think about how artists like Bruce Springsteen create great work throughout their lives, does their ability to preserve childlike qualities play a role? Does this curiosity and excitement allow them to turn what could be mundane into something special through a fresh perspective? I feel like I witnessed high school students generating this unique energy in the office almost every day.

My guess is that your office probably has much more to gain (and much more to offer) from working with students than you might think.

3) Secret Weapon

“How did all this research happen so quickly” or “How did you get an answer already?” The high school intern team would constantly work on important items in the evenings. For example, they knew that 5pm CA time (8pm in NY) was ideal to follow up with talent reps. Often I’d wake up to a series of emails reflecting substantial progress. And summer Fridays, when most staff may be “checked out,” you have an alternative army ready and willing to keep your projects going!

4) They Don’t Want Perfect

We took the students with us to meetings. They interacted with all the board members and volunteers regularly. Sometimes they observed disagreements, or we needed to work through responses to challenging circumstances. What might surprise you? Year after year, student evaluation forms reflected these sticky situations as valuable and interesting; this is when they learned the most.

____________________________________________________

But how do we get employers to understand this? How would we achieve emotional buy-in? When education experts like Julie Lammers from American Student Assistance ask Career Readiness Panelists how to make employers more of a solution provider & integral partner, the four items above are at the heart of the matter.

When I interviewed dozens of staff members at twenty different NYC creative companies about internship participation, what did I find? Stress. More than half expressed a version of, “In theory, I could probably enjoy mentoring, but who has the freaking time?” Most interpreted internship participation as “hosting students” absorbing several hours from their workday. How much the students could contribute did not occur to almost anyone I spoke to.

If we could curate effective intern experiences for employers and capture them on video — so they could see student productivity for themselves — would this move the needle? Does anyone else think that this is worth trying?