Why You Should Consider Hiring a Virtual Intern
Virtual internships broaden access to professional opportunities for young people in rural areas and open new recruiting pipelines for organizations.
By Kat Chen and Hailey Williams
When we think about internships, we usually picture students going to an office in-person and gaining experience shadowing professionals. However, the pandemic has forced us to rethink many aspects of daily life — internships are no exception. In our first blog post of this two-part series, we talked about how virtual internships for youth can be successful and just as meaningful as in-person internships. Here, we discuss why other organizations should consider virtual internships, tips from our own experience hosting virtual interns, and why these opportunities are important for youth.
Why You Should Hire Virtual Interns
- Companies benefit from having (virtual) interns.
- Virtual internships broaden an organization’s reach for recruiting.
- Interns bring a unique perspective that can benefit the entire organization.
Though we tend to think of work-based experiences as primarily beneficial for the students who participate in them, companies can also benefit from these programs. There are many reasons why businesses and organizations should hire youth interns. High school interns can take on work to help manage an organization’s general workload. Youth have also grown up around technology and are “digital natives” who can provide technological expertise and troubleshooting that could be beneficial to the workplace.
Internships are also an important part of strengthening business recruiting pipelines. “Employers who offer high school internships build brand awareness early, fill up their talent pipelines and [are] able to remain competitive in their marketplace,” said Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding, for SHRM. Many companies end up recruiting new hires from the interns in their programs, since the internship itself can serve as a sort of trial period of the interns’ abilities. For example, Abbott, a global health technology company based in Chicago, says that it hires more than 60 percent of its interns every year. With virtual internships, organizations can source new talent and help mold the future of the workplace.
Companies can also benefit from the fresh perspective that virtual interns bring. In the fall, foundry10 hosted its first Gap Year Internship program for recent high school graduates whose plans were disrupted by the pandemic. The Gap Year Internship was a 10-week paid program that happened entirely online. We found that the unique experiences of our virtual interns led to valuable insights that made our work at foundry10 even better.
“I think getting to work directly with young people is so valuable for us as an organization if we are humble and open enough to listen to them. We’ve already learned so much from talking directly with interns about how to run a more supportive and inclusive internship program, and they bring unique ideas and perspectives to the table,” said Ella Shahn, who helped run the Gap Year Internship.
“As a youth-serving organization, it is super important that we remain connected and in touch with what youth need,” said Anna Cechony, a member of foundry10’s Gap Year Internship team. “Having three people who just graduated from high school on our staff helps the teams they are on and the team as a whole gain perspective. Especially in this time, none of us have the experience of being a student during the pandemic, and the gap year interns do. They bring a lot of knowledge to these spaces.”
10 Tips for Running a Remote Internship
Running a remote internship is hard, especially if you haven’t done it before. Here are our top ten tips for running a remote internship for high school students.
- Streamline communication: It’s important to have a clear system of how communication will be used and executed throughout the internship program. During our internship, we ran into a couple of issues because we didn’t figure this out ahead of time. For example, some groups used Google hangouts, some used Zoom, Zoom was a mess at times, and we had to find alternatives for messaging between mentors.
- Get feedback: Ask the interns what could be better! If this is what the new normal looks like, the interns themselves know what they need best. It’s always useful to know how programs can be made better and more accessible.
- Create a resource folder: For many students, an internship is one of their first jobs. Have a shared folder with resources somewhere on the web that all interns have access to make it easy for your interns. In our folder, we included resources like our Employee Handbook and links to help with filling out tax forms, emergency contact information, and other paperwork. We learned that it’s best to make paperwork digital at all times if possible and to set a firm deadline for interns to return their paperwork!
- Know your limits: Knowing what you can and cannot support up front (or near the beginning) saves a lot of time and stress. By us not clearly stating what is ‘supportable’ during a pandemic, both our team and the interns had to scale back in some ways.
- Have regular meetings: Regular meetings that are somewhat mandatory can make the program feel more like an actual job. It also helps with time management, scheduling, and is a time for everyone who has questions to ask!
- Prepare materials ahead of time: Having an idea of what type of equipment/materials a project will need before the start speeds up the process of purchasing equipment and coordinating drop offs.
- Set clear expectations: Have clear, transparent, open communication about expectations for all interns and at all stages of the process, including during the application process, interview, and on-boarding. We recommend having interns check their emails daily!
- Make the most of mentors: Mentors are important for guiding interns and helping them with their work, but mentorship can extend beyond the projects themselves. When mentors listen to their mentee’s unique goals, they can find ways to support interns in reaching those goals both during the internship and after. The nature of virtual internships can also make some aspects, like networking, more difficult. Mentors can support interns with their professional development by doing things like helping them polish up their resumes and empowering them to connect with other internal staff members.
- Treat your interns like employees: Treat them all as employees, as co-workers, colleagues, etc. This means holding them to similar standards as you would full-time staff by having them respond to emails in a timely manner, being on time for meetings, and communicating if things need to be rescheduled. Foundry10’s internship is student led, so it is ultimately up to the interns to decide how to approach working on their projects and asking for what they need.
- A word of advice: From Hailey Williams, who leads foundry10’s High School Internship: “Allow them to fail, try again, learn to ask questions, and critically think through their obstacles. We saw a lot of great problem solving over the summer just by nudging them in the right direction and not giving them the right answer/handout/quick and easy way of doing things. It helps to have them navigate through the workplace environment and interact with other staff/interns more by allowing them to ask questions and assess the aftermath.”
Creating Opportunity for the Next Generation
Remote internships have the potential to reach a wider audience and youth who wouldn’t otherwise have access to this kind of professional opportunity. For example:
- Students in rural areas who can’t commute to an urban office everyday.
- Shy or introverted students who may be excluded due to traditional power dynamics.
- Internships provide youth with hands-on learning opportunities that can prepare them for entering the workforce.
Having virtual internships rather than in-person internships allows for students from a broader geographic area to participate in such a program. When companies host virtual internships, they’re able to reach students who can’t commute to an urban office everyday, including students who live in more rural areas or who are in different parts of the country.
For example, one of our Gap Year Interns lived in Friday Harbor, which is three hours and a ferry ride away from foundry10’s office in the heart of Seattle’s University District. If the internship hadn’t been online, she wouldn’t have been able to apply and we would’ve missed out on all of the value and hard work that she brought to foundry10. The lesson from this summer is that geography is not a barrier when it comes to recruiting.
Another example of how virtual internships can reach students far and wide is our current fall internship program. This semester, we were able to offer internships to students from two schools that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to partner with. This opportunity was made possible due to the convenience of remote learning. One of the groups is from Vashon Island and is using their internship to create a student-led podcast. The other interns are coming from Mariner High School, where school curriculum rules didn’t allow off site internships before the pandemic. Now, things have changed. With schools going virtual, we may start to see more of them open up to the idea of incorporating more project-based learning and internships into their curriculum as opportunities for students.
Working remotely may also make internship opportunities more accessible to students who are shy or more introverted. Virtual interns don’t have to deal with all of the visual representations of workplace life and hierarchy. Those office power dynamics can be pretty daunting; when internships are online, more reserved interns may have a chance to thrive. In a way, “it creates a very even playing field.”
Online internships can also help prepare students for life. According to a report from Echelon Insights, millennials reported that they overwhelmingly did not feel like their education prepared them for the future. They found that only 39 percent of millennials thought their education prepared them to succeed in college or post-secondary education, 22 percent said that their high school experiences left them with the ability to succeed in the workforce, and just 20 percent felt like they were prepared to navigate life and real-world problems.
Internships can offer students opportunities to learn skills that they don’t learn in a traditional classroom setting. Even when internships are remote, they’re still an important opportunity for students to grow their skills and they play an important role in their professional development — even if that learning takes place in a different setting.
At foundry10, our high school internship uses a project-based learning model that allows students to conceptualize and develop their own ideas. These kinds of projects can help students learn skills that they need to succeed in life, like perseverance. “This internship feels driven by me, and in that sense I’m motivated to make it work. At school I might give up after challenges but here it is what I make of it and that gives me the drive to figure out how to adapt to setbacks,” said one intern.
Having more choice, freedom, and personal responsibility enabled the interns to feel more invested in their projects. In turn, they were more motivated to complete them. As one intern said, “With this project I know I’m going to appreciate the final product, whereas school work is just work.”
Many of the interns found this kind of hands-on learning different and more engaging than the preparation they received from their school. One intern said, “I’ve always been unsatisfied [with] the way conventional learning in school is, and after going through this internship realized that there is a better way. We just need to get the word out there that this type of learning is more engaging, impactful, and relevant than much of our classes at schools.”
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