"We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future."

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

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Have you taken a look at your organization's internship and co-operative education program lately? Do some of the elements of your program need to be recast to maximum the opportunity to leverage internships as a talent acquisition strategy? Emerging talent on campuses today may be star performers for your organization tomorrow. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Future Directions Taskforce Predictions Report for 2017, these trends will continue to expand: college employer partnerships, employee mentors for students, courting of relationships with college professors by companies and organizations using college alumni for recruiting.

Do you need more time to complete important projects that are getting pushed to the back of your to do list? Are you looking for creativity and technological savvy to spice up a project? Do you have some short-term projects that you have time to oversee, but not to do? Then think about what an intern can accomplish for you. Think of opportunities you can provide for interns to gain experience in their field of endeavor.

What is in it for My Organization?

• Enables completion of important tasks and projects
• Brings new perspectives, ideas and energy to the workplace
• Allows employers to give back to the community and the state by grooming young professionals for career choices
• Provides mentoring opportunities for your organization's high performers and emerging leaders
• Enhances recruitment — interns report back on their experiences (so make sure it is a good experience); additionally, many interns return to work for organizations they interned for. Your organization can deputize successful interns or interns turned employees for participation on blogs or podcasts, and at career fairs and alumni association events. Give a powerful boost to your organization's credibility and future success by taking a former successful intern back to the campus with you to speak for your organization and its career opportunities.

What is in it for the Student?

• Explores job, industry knowledge and career choices in an actual work setting
• Acquires practical work experience — a good experience provides meaningful work and a sense of accomplishment
• Learns about a workplace's culture, mission and values

• Gains valuable competencies, and builds skills, workplace behaviors and interpersonal abilities
• Enhances career connections network
• Opens doors for potential post college career

Guidelines

Work with the schools. Spend time on school websites — two year and four year colleges, universities and graduate programs have lists of degree programs, and percentages of graduates by major. How do the majors correlate with your organization's career opportunities? Contact a school's career placement center or faculty internship advisor. High schools have college and career information centers too. Contact a teacher or professor. Volunteer to participate in mock interviews on campus. Highlight a section about internships on your website and post a video there depicting a recent intern or college hire. Better yet, arrange a visit. Speak to a class. Sponsor a site visit to your organization by a faculty member, academic advisor, internship coordinator, counselor, campus organization or class. Gina Ruiz, writing for Workforce Management, says that summer internships should not end once classes resume. For the best return on your investment, she advocates making former interns a part of your work community by keeping in touch with interns — via e-mail, an electronic newsletter, instant messaging or blogging.

Student learning/earning experiences come in several forms — with various names including internships, externships, and co-operative learning opportunities. Although many interns are paid wages for their contributions, others receive course credit hours from the school. Some schools have structured guidelines for participating organizations. Other learning/earning opportunities are less formal and are dependent upon the organization taking the lead in structuring them.

Build the Framework for an Awesome Internship:

• To make sure the experience is beneficial for both the student and your organization, identify a supervisor for each internship or cooperative educational opportunity. Interns or co-op students need an accomplished, personable point person to report to. The supervisor's role can include familiarizing the student with the organization and providing and overseeing the project assignment(s). Best practice aligns the supervisor's role closely with the type of project work the student will perform — match business school or accounting interns with business or accounting professionals; match science majors with scientists.
• Intern or co-op student supervisors are likely to spend their most intense time with the student during the early phase of the opportunity because of orientation and training. A good plan provides an intern with ample project work, with some guidelines, and perhaps a few extra work items, as need arises, or to fill in any down time. The work should keep the intern busy and engaged and enable them to feel productive while giving them a sense of ownership of the assigned projects.
• While the supervisor works directly with the student on assigned projects, one can add to the depth of the intern's experience by assigning an additional mentor, buddy or workgroup within the organization to work informally with the student to help them get to know the ropes, handle internship challenges and to serve as a backup for questions when the supervisor is unavailable.
• Identify meaningful project work. Identify the timeframe for the work, along with responsibilities and opportunities, as well as qualifications and skills, before advertising the internship. Potential interns need to know as much as possible about the skills required and the type of work and projects they will be involved with. The information you provide should enable a clear understanding of the experience to be gained from the internship and the field it will let him/her explore. While most work includes some mundane, repetitive or paper scuffling components, fetching doughnuts and watering the office plants will not engage the student and will likely alienate them, resulting in negative feedback about your organization. Moreover, in today's social network communication age, a bad internship experience may result in bad mouth blogging - which gets around very quickly - about your organization.
• To maximize the opportunity, the intern and the supervisor should establish a goal setting meeting at the onset of the internship so that both parties agree to and understand expectations, actions and roles. Establish frequent opportunities for progress review, feedback, and questions. Avoid hovering in order to give the intern an opportunity for creative ownership of his/her work.