Learning From Your Interns
This year we took on two interns to help us with PR and Marketing. They were both out of state and continued to go to school while working remotely for us. My business partner and I are both huge advocates of making sure that interns are not used as cheap, sweatshop labor. It’s the employer’s responsibility to make sure that every internship position adds value to the company, but more importantly, gives a young person some of the experience, skills, and knowledge they’ll need to compete for a career in their field of choice.
So when the internships recently ended, we sent them the following questions to answer:
- Was the internship what you thought it would be?
- Was the amount of responsibility fair for the number of hours you’d be told you would spend? Too much, too little?
- Did you learn from the internship?
- Did you gain experience you can use to build your career in the internship?
- Did you feel the amount of supervision/communication was right/too much/ too little?
- Did you feel as though you were part of the team or being taken advantage of?
- What would you have liked to learn or done that didn’t happen?
- What could we have done better or differently to improve the internship based on the role you were hired for?
- Do you think the telecommuting worked?
- Any suggestions as to what we could do to improve the value of the internship for the next person?
Thankfully, none of the feedback was a surprise and primarily positive. In most part because we ask many of these questions from time to time on our weekly calls. There’s no need to wait until something is over to find out how it’s going.
Both sides stand to gain a lot from internships when they’re done right. We were able to get some A-players based on the experience we promised we could provide over high pay for mundane work. They in turn gained experience to get them ready for their career. One of our interns was just recently hired for a full time position and she attributes her experience with FYIndOut directly for helping her land the job. It’s very rewarding for both sides.
If you were to ask your interns the questions above, what would their answers be?
