Should Internships Be Fully Remote?

Is remote work diminishing the efficacy of the summer internship experience for thousands of young college students?  Emmy Lucas has written an article on summer internships for Forbes this week.  In that article, she examines how challenging it is this summer for many students to land internships, given the layoffs at many firms, particularly in the tech sector.  She also raises a question about how remote work has affected the ability of interns to learn, grow, and develop successfully.   Here's an excerpt from her article.  She begins with a comment by Jane Ashen Turkewitz, who administers internship placement for the University of Texas at Austin: 

Remote work has also put a damper on the intern experience. “I remember joining the workforce in my twenties and it being super fun,” Ashen Turkewitz says. “You would do your work, but there was camaraderie, there was brainstorming. There was an energy that I believe students and early career folks are missing out on, big time.”

On Glassdoor, negative mentions of remote work in reviews by interns grew by 548% between 2019 and 2021. “Clearly a lot of companies' internship programs are struggling to adapt to the new normal,” Glassdoor’s Terrazas says. “Big companies have been leading the charge in getting folks back into the office, so I'm really going to be curious to see if it has a measurable effect in terms of experience this summer.”

Salesforce’s head of global futureforce programs, Alex Murray, says its interns are back fully in person. “We’ve experimented with remote and hybrid programs over the past few years,” she said in an email. “But our interns told us they want to be in an office environment.”

Kate Feeney, who is interning a second summer at Raytheon Technologies, spent last summer fully remote, but is going to the office one or two days a week this summer. “It’s a lot more isolating [working] online,” she says of her experience last year. Now, “I get to ask more questions about [my co-workers’] job rather than it being so focused sitting on a Zoom listening to them talk.”

This article raises very important questions.  In my view, business leaders need to invest the time and effort to meet with their interns in person throughout a summer experience.  Apprenticeship, learning, and development will often (not always, but often) not take place as effectively in a fully remote manner.  One challenge is that many managers want the flexibility of working remotely often during the summer months.  However, if you hire an intern, you have a responsibility to make that experience meaningful and productive.  Managers should be paying it forward, offering the mentorship and guidance they once received at a young age.   

Accepting that Job Offer When the Internship Ends

You have completed your summer internship, and you have received a full-time offer of employment.  Fantastic!  Now, should you accept the position.  Most young people might say, "If you had a good summer internship experience, then of course, you should take the job."   Jon Simmons has published a good article for Fast Company that addresses this issue.   Simmons suggests that the answer might not be so simple.

How should you make this decision?   Simmons suggests careful consideration of a wide range of factors including compensation, benefits, company culture, opportunities for growth and development.  Certainly, all of these items matter.  However, I think the decision should not primarily be about factors such as compensation.  In fact, the differences in compensation across multiple job offers will be relatively trivial for most students.  The real issue is growth and development.   Interns should ask themselves three questions:

1.  Will my full-time position be substantively different than my internship experience?  Will it be more challenging?  Will I assume new responsibilities?  Will I learn new skills?  If the answer is no to these questions, then you don't want to take the offer.  The best firms that hire here at Bryant University provide full-time opportunities that build upon, but go well beyond, the internships that they offer.

2.  Does the firm have a track record of investing in the growth and development of its young employees?   Will I have opportunities to enhance my skills through in-house leadership development programs, training courses, tuition reimbursement at local universities, and mentoring by senior leaders?   If the answer is yes, then you should seriously consider taking the job offer.

3.  What are my short term career goals, and would this full-time position help me achieve those goals?  Don't think in terms of 10-15 year plans.    That's just not advisable in today's world.  Think instead of the next 5 years.  What do you hope to achieve?  Suppose you plan to apply to a top MBA program. Then ask yourself:  Will this full-time position help me gain admittance to such a school?  Suppose instead that you hope to become a young entrepreneur.  You should ask:  How will this position help me achieve that goal?

Using Internships to Facilitate the Reverse Mentoring Process

What is reverse mentoring?  It's when you have the new, young, rising talent in an organization teaching and advising the experienced managers and executives.   An effective reverse mentoring process enables senior executives to keep tabs on key social and technological trends.  Moreover, it provides a way for senior leaders to gain a better understanding of the millennial employee and customer.  

Phil McKinney has a great podcast focused on managing innovation (it's called Killer Innovations).  He is the CEO of CableLabs, and he formerly served as Chief Technology Officer for HP's Personal Systems Group.  McKinney says the following about reverse mentorship:

Each summer, we bring in interns across a wide range of disciplines: technical, legal, marketing and this year social media.  This years interns were impressive.  Over the years – I use interns to be my pulse on what is happening in the education system. In my previous role, I would select two and have them stay at my house. For their internship, they would report to someone else. At night – it was the barrage of constant questions. Why must we do something a certain way? Why aren’t we doing this?

Most people think I’m nuts for even doing this. I learn so much. It’s a process I call “reverse mentoring.”

Now most of us would not be willing to take interns into our homes.  However, we can find ways to structure a series of conversations with our summer interns to tap into their insights, knowledge, and creativity.   In some firms, you might do this through a series of one-on-one conversations with interns.  In others, you might assemble teams of interns, and ask each team to take on a particular innovation challenge for the firm.  The teams then might be given the opportunity to present their findings to senior executives.   Interns will enjoy this type of activity, because they get a chance to do something that is definitely not mundane, routine work.  Moreover, they have a chance to get in front of senior leaders.  Meanwhile, your organization creates a natural reverse mentoring process.

Follow Your Passion: Is it Really Good Advice?

You've all heard the advice:  Discover and follow your passion.  I certainly advise my students to do so.  Is it really good advice though?  Sarah Leary, co-founder and Vice President of marketing and operations at Nextdoor, has an interesting perspective on this topic.   She shared it with Fortune recently.   She explains:  

Many talented businessmen and women advise young people to follow their passions. However, I’ve seen that most are paralyzed by this open-ended advice because they don’t know what they are passionate about in the professional world. And this isn’t entirely their fault. They simply lack the real world experience and feedback to distinguish what they are truly passionate about — yet. In fact, the advice to follow your passion can often work against you as an inexperienced young professional.

What should young people do instead?   Should they not try to discover and follow their passions?  No, she simply argues that one needs to get out there and gain work experience so as to learn what really motivates and inspires you.   Gaining a variety of professional experiences early in your career can help you discover what your passions are and what you enjoy doing.  She recommends pursuing multiple internships while in school.   She advises exploring different industries, companies, and roles.  As Leary states, "Concrete work experience, even as an intern, is illuminating."  Students will not only learn what they enjoy doing... they also will learn what they dislike.   

I would take it one step further.  Internships provide one important way to discover your passions.  There are others.   Take on leadership roles on campus in various organizations.  Shadow alumni  for a day at various companies, if your university has such a program (we do at Bryant University).   Work hard on class projects that involve consulting work for companies and organizations in your region.  Think carefully about the type of campus job that you might like to apply for, particularly in your junior or senior year.  Use independent studies or field study projects to explore an area of interest in more depth.  These techniques, and many more, will help you discover your passions. 

The Value of Internships

Students in college often fret over landing that attractive internship over the summer.  Should they worry so much about internships?  Or, should college students be content with a decent job as a waiter or waitress over the summer?   Business Week's data from its undergraduate business school rankings survey indicates that they should be working hard to land that internship.  The magazine reports that, "Overall, 75 percent of students said they had an internship. Of those, 61 percent had a job offer in hand by the winter of their senior year, compared with 28 percent of students without an internship."  It appears that internships matter a great deal in certain industries, such as banking and consulting.   Overall, though, they are valuable regardless of what field you choose.  I know that many firms recruiting here at Bryant University do much of their hiring through their internship program.  Their goal, in fact, is to fill most of their openings through hiring of summer interns who performed very well.   They prefer that mode of hiring to the usual process of interviewing seniors who are approaching commencement.