Category Archives: Hosting an Intern

Take a Carnegie Mellon Student to Work!

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Lamp - Carnegie Mellon Tartan Trak Program

 

“A whole new world
Every turn a surprise
With new horizons to pursue
Every moment red-letter”
(From the Disney Film “Aladdin”. Song: “A Whole New World”)

 

When it comes to learning life lessons, experience is the best teacher. The Carnegie Mellon University Career & Professional Development Center staff advises students to pursue a variety of work experiences in order to get a feel for where their skills and interests could be best utilized in the “real world”.

We are looking for Pittsburgh employers who are willing to show a Carnegie Mellon student “a new fantastic point of view.” The new Take a Tartan to Work program allows you to combine a day’s work with a volunteer experience by hosting a Carnegie Mellon student. We believe that students should not only talk with professionals in their desired career track but also witness them in action. This exposure will help them assess their “fit” within a particular work environment and explore possible career fields.

How can you volunteer to show your world to a Carnegie Mellon student?

- It’s easy! The first step to hosting a Carnegie Mellon student is to fill out a questionnaire, found here:
“Take a Tartan to Work” Sponsor Questionnaire

- October 21, 2011 and March 9, 2012 are the days that we have scheduled for the program. If you are unable to host for the day, there is an option on the survey for offering an informational interview.

Why you?

You don’t need to be Aladdin to give a Carnegie Mellon student an out-of-this world job shadowing experience. We are looking for a diverse group of volunteers – from musicians to software systems engineers to researchers. This is a critical time in the sophomores’ lives for making decisions about their academic major and career track and your willingness to give them a glimpse of what you do can make a large difference.

Internships Reduce Employee Attrition Rates

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employee attrition rate

Image extracted from: Outsource Portfolio

Employee attrition is a term that describes the loss of personnel or employee turn over rates. The RIC believes that internships are the best way for our employers to cultivate and select a skilled workforce and reduce employee attrition rates. That’s why we’ve helped companies create internship programs for their companies since 2003 and have made over 6,000 internship matches, many of those internships turning into jobs.

Internships allow your business to:

* See how someone works doing the job you need to get done,

* Train that person to the unique needs of your company over time,

* Learn important information from the interns that they are learning right now in academia

Employee attrition is expensive and time consuming.  By cultivating a pool of candidates from your internship program your company is given the assurance that the people in that pool know your company and want to stay with your company–and probably longer than a year or two years.

In 2005 The Pennsylvania Economy League published a document called “Jobs of the Future” .  The report focused on how the region can foster job growth in southwestern PA over the next 15 years.  One interesting fact pointed out is that 85% of job vacancies in southwestern PA will not be due to job growth, but due to replacing people in jobs that exist already.  It’s no secret that our region is older, and therefore many people are retiring.  Retirement causes a trickled down effect: once people retire, that triggers the need to promote a whole set of people into those now vacant jobs, and then those newly promoted now have shoes to fill.

Your company can address job vacancies and employee attrition by building a strong internship program.  The Regional Internship Center is here to help you do just that!  Please contact Regina Anderson if you have questions at randerson@coropittsburgh.org, or 412.258.2685

 

Hosting an Intern: Do a Great Job!

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Hosting an intern can be a very gratifying experience. More than just helping your organization recruit great talent and getting extra work done, hosting an intern gives you the opportunity to make a difference in the professional future of the intern. Your guidance can help them get a great job and become a better professional after graduation.

Go the extra mile when hosting an intern

Image extracted from: Motivational Cartoons

I’m currently hosting an intern and supervising him has given me great joy. Looking back in my career, there are lots of things I wish I was aware of that could have helped me and now, hosting an intern gives me the opportunity to pass this knowledge along. Here are some things I have been sharing with my intern that you can share with yours:

Internship Goals

The first thing I asked my intern was: “What do you want to want to take away from this internship? What do you want to learn?”  He quickly told me a a few things he felt would be important for a career in Public Relations. Great! He was hired to do a certain job that perfectly aligned with the internship description: write press releases and create a media list.

Career Goals

But, hosting an intern means not only to fulfill the needs your intern thinks he/she has; hosting an intern means helping someone who’s brand new to the job market, to expand their horizons. The second thing I asked of my intern was for him to tell me what kinds of jobs he thinks he will be interested in once he graduates and if he has done a job search. He told me he has looked here and there, but hasn’t started a job search since he only graduates next May.

So, I asked him to search for a few job options that he felt he could be interested in for the future and print out the job descriptions. Together, we are going to look into the kind of experience required for the jobs that he’s interested in. We can then ask ourselves:

  • Are the required skills for these potential jobs, the same as the ones we had in mind?
  • Are there other skills that we didn’t think of that are common requirements for these jobs?
  • Can we develop projects for this intern that will contribute to the organization and also to the intern’s experience?
  • Do we currently have projects that the intern is not involved in but could benefit from?

This can expand the scope of the intern’s work, giving him more valuable experience, and also contributing to your organization. Hosting an intern really is a win-win situation!

Hosting an Intern and Building a Great Resume

We all the importance of being able to provide numbers and results on a resume (if you didn’t know that, check out our “Resume Tips” category for more info). You can help your intern build a great resume by providing him with some numbers for his resume. For example, the intern has contributed to writing the copy for a campaign; this campaign helped the company increase sales by 20%. If you give this information to the intern, he can put on his resume that he not only performed a task, but that he was very successful at it.

Hosting an intern and making a good impression on this representative of the upcoming workforce will build an image for your organization of being a great employer!

Thinking about hosting an intern at your organization? The RIC can help!

Employers: Don’t fear hosting an intern!

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Image extracted from the "Words for Hire" website

A frequent conversation the Regional Internship Center team has with employers often sounds like the following:

“Good morning, Regional Internship Center, this is Trisha, “How may I help you?”

“My company is interested in internships, but I’ve never hosted an intern before and I don’t know where to start.”

Employers! We are here to help you!

The RIC team often talks to employers about the many benefits to their businesses by hosting an intern: increased capacity, decreased training costs, increased diversity and new knowledge; the list is endless. Creating an internship program and hosting an intern is a bid deal for your business. Beyond the many benefits to your business, the RIC team talks to employers about the benefits any successful internship program should have for the intern. Once your company decides to begin an internship program, you are also deciding to be a “career mentor.”

Hosting an intern for the first time causes many of us employers to be nervous—that is normal! You may be concerned about not having enough time to provide adequate supervision during the course of the many internships or fear of not being a good career mentor causing your intern to have an unpleasant experience. The RIC team has heard these concerns and many others. Our answer most often sounds like this, “I completely understand. The first step is that you have already begun to think about your internship program. It’s also important to discuss concerns such as these with your co-workers and develop a plan for your internship program. Planning is the most important component to a successful internship program.”

If you are still nervous about hosting an intern for the first time one way to ease into the process is to host a job shadow student with your company for a week. Job shadows are sort of like mini internships but without the commitment. It will allow you to test the waters of intern hosting and give the student exposure to your line of work as well as see which employees might be suited for being the career mentor for a full-fledged internship program.

Looking back on former internships, I can say that I have gained a lot from former supervisors and because of the various things I learned from them, each a career mentor. One of my first supervisors is currently completing her PhD (after working in her field for ten years) and has a passion for learning new languages. She taught me that continuous learning is vital in professional development. During my second internship, I learned that in order to be effective, one must learn to work as a team with co-workers and how to be an effective listener. I also learned that there is still much to learn and that it is ok to be an observer and ask questions when something is not clear.

Here at Coro Pittsburgh/RIC we host many interns throughout the year. We know that interns are valuable in moving our organization forward to achieve our goals, but we also simply enjoy mentoring people. Many times, a positive internship experience can change the focus of a person’s career path. When you are ready to welcome interns into your organization, we will assist you in writing a post with a great position description.

Never thought that hosting an intern would have such a big impact? Neither did I.