In my last article, I discussed how Remote Externships, a new form of work experience we invented at Extern, address common challenges that have hindered learning-integrated work experiences from becoming mainstream. Here, I examine some of the barriers preventing employers from engaging more early-talent candidates via internship programs and how the remote Externship is a great solution for resource-constrained teams.
There's a huge demand for internship opportunities in the market, yet companies are unwilling to offer more of them despite potential benefits, like a wider and more diverse talent pool.
That's because asking companies to participate in a learning-based work program is akin to just asking them to donate their time as a volunteer. Expecting employees to find value in spending their time on work projects with large groups of students is a big ask.
Think about it.
What usually happens when someone says that the interns have arrived is that you hastily give them something to work on for a day, while you figure out what to really give them. Despite your best intentions to want to support and mentor young people, you start to think of the intern as more of a liability while you have that big project deadline looming. And next time that your HR manager asks if you’d like an intern, you are more likely to pass. Of course there are plenty of one off examples of exceptional students who come into an internship and blow everyone away. Or of managers who have the time and patience to support an intern and take them under their wing. But these are exceptions to the rule.
When considering the revamped Externship we discussed earlier, we have to look beyond general proclamations that “companies should build a bridge with higher education” or only listen to managers praising their internship programs filled with Harvard, Stanford, and Penn interns saying that in-person internships are the only effective approach. We have to look at the average situation. We have to think about win-win scenarios. We have to think about incentives. We have to consider human psychology. We have to acknowledge the harsh realities of a free market system.
The reimagined Externship is designed to take all of the administrative burden off the plate of company employees and HR managers, while also acting as a curation funnel for the best ideas and outputs.
Imagine spending less time than it takes to manage one full-time intern, while getting the collective wisdom of hundreds of externs. It’s 1/10 the input for 100x the output.
Most of the work is on the front end – scoping the project and expectations. This does require some effort and foresight, something a lot of employees may normally skimp on with interns, which leads to misunderstanding. But the outcome is having aligned expectations. Besides that, the employee manager just needs to show up every other week with students as a kind of “guest lecturer” to talk about the project, the goals, the company, and answer questions. Basically, it’s the fun part! Behind the scenes, program managers and teaching assistants are taking the burden off of employees by answering all the little questions that come up from students, from how to use a tool to the best way to conduct analysis. In addition, students are getting trained by curriculum designed specifically with the project objectives in mind.
By the end, the program managers, teaching assistants, and student peers have crowdsourced the best student work and the top students. These students present a synthesized summary of their work, oftentimes with recommendations and insights, to company employees and leadership. These top students can be considered for further engagement by the company’s hiring managers and recruiting teams, or identified as top candidates for internship pipelines (which we’ve seen with some of our externship partners like AT&T, Home Depot, and Macquarie).
None of this is possible without thoughtful applications of software, user interfaces, data, and workflow processes. Technology is needed to scale the training, workflow, and support of students as well as the administrative burden removed from company plates. This is where the magic happens.
The key is to build an experience that is structured enough to provide repeatability, and scalability, and quality outcomes for both companies and students without burdening busy employees.
The ideal Externship project will satisfy these principles:
Ideal projects today include market research, customer interviews, and product discovery & prototyping – all pillars of an effective product innovation strategy. Other ideal projects include cybersecurity, IT, business development, search engine optimization, content creation, strategic reviews, talent acquisition, brand design, and data analysis. Today, highly technical projects like software engineering break one of the principles above – externs either need more experience or managers need to spend a lot of time training over a very extended period of time. But in time, we will have technical Externships as well. In fact, our first will be in cybersecurity which launches later in 2024!
What many of these projects have in common is that they require a lot of human hours to actually engage with research, customers, potential customers, and run experiments. Whether you are a startup founder trying to get to product market fit, or a Chief Product Officer at a Fortune 500 responsible for a major product or new feature launch, or a Head of Marketing conducting research on market expansion, you need to validate your market, customer, and product concept before investing significant time and money into building anything. This process cannot be skipped (although many do and end up building something nobody wants). But it takes time that leaders and their teams usually don’t have when deadlines are looming and budgets are limited.
In my next article, I will discuss how Higher Ed needs to evolve to better support job outcomes for students and where remote Externships offer colleges a convenient solution to integrate work experience opportunities into their curricula.
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