Talent · Training

Building Your Talent Pipeline - Internships

EDSI · Jan 23, 2018

Internships are another great way to build your talent pipeline and strengthen your overall workforce strategy. When designed thoughtfully, they serve as a powerful source of emerging talent while also helping to elevate your employer brand and visibility among future job seekers. Internships give organizations the opportunity to engage, mentor, and evaluate potential hires early — creating a win-win for both employers and students.

But there are both right and wrong ways to do internships. Here are some great do’s and don’ts for starting and running internship programs that are highly valuable. Because highly valuable internships will help ensure you have a line of the best and brightest ready for an opportunity to work with your company.

Internships Best Practices

For step-by-step guidance, explore our Essential Guide to Building a Successful Internship Program, which outlines how to design impactful experiences that benefit both employers and interns.

Building Successful Internship Programs

Do: Connect content to education and career path.

Connect the internship to your intern’s educational focus and career path. It’s important for the student to be learning about what they’re studying in school. They will be more engaged, motivated and interested in their work.

Do: Create a defined role with structure.

Structuring internships may require more work up front, but they ultimately create a more engaging environment.

Do: Provide adequate compensation.

Highly desirable internships are not only connected with career paths and have a defined structure, they pay well! If you can create this environment and reputation as an employer, you will have the best of the best fighting for the opportunity to intern with you.

Do: Make the work meaningful and educational.

Make sure your interns are truly learning something valuable in the process of their internship.

Do: Make the intern feel included.

Include your interns in lunches, work outings, etc. Having an opportunity to build relationships with coworkers will help your interns feel like part of the team.

Do: Provide a dedicated mentor or manager.

It is important to have someone whose solely responsible for ensuring their intern(s) will be engaged, productive and working on projects that they can learn from. Having a mentor is a critical part of everyone’s professional path.

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