Business Case: Why Your Internship Program Needs a Dedicated Management System
In today’s heavily remote working world, competition is high and supply is low. In order to stand out from the competition, it is essential to have a solid internship program management system in 2022 that can attain, engage and retain high performance interns.
Corporate leaders face an important challenge—finding and retaining top talent in a highly competitive and ever-evolving human capital landscape. The talent war has escalated, increasing competition on the early career talent front. Today’s interns and young talent demand more from organizations. Companies need to deliver a meaningful experience within an 8-10 week window while improving their productivity, transparency, and ROI.
As a result, organizations are evaluating their home-grown internship and early career program management processes with an eye toward shifting from ad hoc, disconnected tools (e.g., SurveyMonkey® and Microsoft Excel®) to more strategic and integrated solutions. Here’s why:
The battle for early career talent is more competitive than ever.
A study conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) indicates that internship investments are climbing to all-time highs. 
- 4% more intern and 6.3% more co-op positions will be created this year, and
- 83% of employers offering internships plan to maintain or increase intern hiring
Interns are future gold.
According to NACE, the average full-time employment offer rate to interns reached 72.7 percent in 2016 and continues to climb. Conversions hit a rate of 61.9 percent—a 13-year high. Interns are your future full-time employees. Engaging them early and nurturing them through their early career paves the road to success, confidence, and contribution.
These future leaders bring new ideas and a fresh vibe to your organization while they learn the practical ropes from mentors. Keeping these new contributors on the fast track from Day 1 isn’t just about hiring them, it’s about engaging them and tapping into their enthusiasm to keep your company ahead of the competition.
Retention, retention, retention.
NACE research also points to the value of integrating and engaging interns to impact long-term retention. They note that interns converted to full-time employment have roughly 20 percent higher retention rates. Attracting and retaining top intern talent is not only business crucial, it leads to measurable ROI.
What do interns want, and how can you deliver?
Today’s young talent demands more from organizations. They want:
- Meaningful work: Do you want to increase offer conversions? Give young talent meaningful work and access to mentors and senior leadership. See our blog post; Harness The Power of Your Interns – Part 3; Mentors where we explore the value of intern mentorship in detail.
- Technology-forward engagement: Tech must be easy and powerful. Interns are connected nearly 24×7 with fingertip-ready apps and social networks. They’re looking for a tech-forward / tech-friendly workplace.
- Conversations, feedback and a voice: Young talent wants two-way communication. They want a voice (i.e. through real time feedback), they want to course-correct and improve performance immediately, and they want to break down barriers by having access to people that can help them build their career.
Organizations that optimize internship engagement through a cohesive and unified software solution more effectively track all the moving parts of their internship and young career programs, and they do it with real-time insight.
Advanced technology solutions dramatically reduce barriers that once made effective intern engagement nearly impossible. These solutions, like vi Internship Program Management, offer at-a-glance dashboards that bring visibility to distributed teams. They also power collaboration and real-time feedback and eliminate manual, time-consuming administration that so often pulls attention away from employee engagement.
At vi, we look at internships differently. We believe you have one chance to impress tomorrow’s leaders, so we’ve put technology at your fingertips, and theirs. We deliver a SaaS-based project collaboration experience that connects interns to your team quickly. Real-time work allocation tunes new employees into your culture, connects them to mentors and puts them on the fast track to success. We’ve also taken the manual administrative tasks out of the picture, clearing the way for connected teams to collaborate and focus on engagement.
We’ve created a Business Case that examines the impact of investing in an internship and early career program management solution. The Business Case explores how the adoption of a unified, and specifically-tuned internship and early employee solution manages employee growth and guides employee integration and retention efforts from day 1.
Download this business case to understand:
- Why disparate employee-tracking spreadsheets and online survey tools aren’t helping you retain top talent.
- Why siloed employee engagement solutions are building barriers across your organization.
- How vi helps you attract, inspire and grow the talented contributors who are your future leaders.
- How vi’s best practice content, templates, workflow, and functionality are specifically geared to intern and early career programs and deliver the meaningful experience interns need.
Learn more about new employee integration and internship program management. If you’d like more information about taking your internship program to the next level, we’d love to help you. We can walk you through a demo, share customer success stories and case studies, and give you the resources you need to choose the right solution for your organization. We’re ready to help, just visit the vi website for more information or connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.