How to craft a meaningful experience for your new interns

With April in full swing and summer just on the horizon, a whole slew of new employees will enter the workforce as summer interns. As an employer, April means it’s time to
prepare for the arrival of your new interns. Here are our suggestions for preparations that will ensure your and your intern both have productive and enjoyable summers.

The Boss Perspective

At this time of year many employers find themselves in the early throes of preparation for this year’s crop of summer interns. Having listened to my daughter and her friends speak about their various internships over the years, I wish to offer a word of advice to significantly enhance the experience for both you and your intern.

From their discussions I noticed one recurring theme—underutilization. It seems in most of their internship experiences their bosses significantly underestimated the complexity, quality, and quantity of work they were capable of delivering.

For example, during one young woman’s internship, her boss actually went away on vacation for two weeks and asked her to start organizing an important conference in her absence. This conference featured a variety of speakers, panelists, and subject-matter experts and also required identifying and inviting targeted participants. Needless to say, it was a complex project requiring quite a bit of planning, organizing, and interpersonal savvy to design and execute. Her boss expected it would take the whole summer. Yet when the boss returned from vacation, to her amazement, her intern had actually organized much of the entire conference: she had identified and tentatively reserved a conference site, solicited and confirmed speakers, drafted the conference agenda, and accomplished any number of tasks associated with organizing and executing an entire conference with over 100 senior-level participants. As a case in point, interns are quite capable of accomplishing complex, high-quality work in a shorter period of time than you may anticipate.

The types of employees you want to hire are likely able to manage multiple, simultaneous tasks of moderate to high complexity. As opposed to erring on the side of underutilization, why not err on the side of overutilization? Give them what you consider too much work and let him or her ask you to prioritize and/or remove some of the tasks. You will probably find yourself quite surprised at their capacity for doing large volumes of high-quality work in a short period of time.

The key is to identify projects that are part of your critical deliverables for the year. Break each project down into its critical components and then give your intern 2-3 of the more critical components for completion. If you are good at balancing eight balls in the air simultaneously, assume that your intern can balance at least 4-5 balls quite successfully. Give them critical tasks you yourself would complete until they tell you they are overwhelmed. And like all good delegators, don’t walk away from the project but continue to provide support and guidance as requested and appropriate. You’ll find both you and your intern will have a much more interesting, productive experience.

The Intern Perspective

As an intern, it is incredibly frustrating not to have enough to do at work. Aside from the desire to gain meaningful work experience, being underutilized makes it impossible to feel helpful or productive, even while doing all the tasks that the employer asks. It does not efficiently use an intern’s time, nor that of the company. Sometimes this results from a lack of communication, or a failure on the intern’s part to think up creative new projects (see our “bored at work” guide). But often times the lack of a sufficient number of projects just means the employer has not yet thought of enough tasks to assign.

Brainstorming tasks for an intern in advance can dramatically improve your intern’s experience. One of my most challenging internships occurred in an office where I was granted access to a number of high-profile meetings, but had almost nothing to do in between. My employer had focused on the “exposure” element of the experience, and had therefore assigned me very few actual tasks to complete. I could see that he wanted to give me more, but given his hectic schedule, did not have the time mid-summer to brainstorm more tasks. While the internship overall was remarkable, I could not feel fully confident about my value added that summer, because to me the assignments felt few and far between. My employer appreciated the work that I did, but never benefitted from the full range of my abilities. Both of us missed out because the brainstorming of project ideas had not been done on the front end.

Interns are often underestimated qualitatively in their ability to produce high quality work, and quantitatively, in their capacity to produce quality work at a fast rate. As an employer, recognize your intern’s potential and plan in advance to keep him or her busy. After all, an intern may surprise you – but only if you give them the chance.

APW & NW

Your Success is our Success