Talent Development: A Fresh Approach to Internships and Apprenticeships

By Kathaleen Emery

 

September 27, 2024

7 min read

Internships and apprenticeships represent an experiential learning concept that’s been around since the late middle ages. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask, what could possibly be new? Are internships still viable in meeting the needs of 21st-century employers? The answers: Plenty, and yes. In the tight labor market we’re experiencing today, the internship may be one of the most indispensable parts of your talent acquisition strategy, attracting highly skilled candidates ready to make an immediate and powerful contribution.

 

In this article, we’ll examine the internship and its benefits to employers, employee learners and career-seeking students. We’ll also explore how DeVry University is leveraging the pre-internship, an innovation from the startup Internship On Demand, to help employers connect with talented, motivated and career-minded students at an earlier stage of their education.   

Not Your Parent’s Internships

In the early 1900s, as our economy transitioned from trades to the establishment of professional workplaces and prioritization of formal education, the business world borrowed the term “internship” from the medical community, where it is still used to describe doctors in training.

Employers, employee learners and students all have reason to feel good about the evolution of internships, and it’s not just that workplace conditions have improved since the 11th century.  While today’s internships don’t look anything like their apprenticeship ancestors, or internships from even a few decades ago, they are still effective. Intern hiring is trending upward. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) projected a 9.1% increase in 2022-2023 intern hiring over the previous year.1

NACE also reports the hybrid internship is here to stay. Nearly two-thirds (64.8%)1 of employers responding to the group’s recent survey expected to provide their 2022-23 interns with a hybrid experience—working a portion of the time in-person and the rest in a virtual environment.

As the tight labor market and unrelenting demand for skilled talent present new challenges for employers who need to shorten the time required to recruit, hire and train, a new concept, the  pre-internship, introduces a new way for employers to identify and develop talent well before their junior year of college.

The Pre-Internship: A New Way to Engage Entry-Level Talent

Students in their junior and senior years of four-year academic programs have traditionally been the prospects for internships, but HR leaders are reporting that talent development and attraction is “moving earlier and earlier.”

Keegan Moldenhauer, CEO and co-founder of Madison, Wisconsin-based Internship On Demand, describes pre-internships as first-step opportunities for students to build professional skills and understand the exact nature of the careers they’re pursuing. According to Moldenhauer, a career path might have historically progressed from college, to internship, to career. Today’s path is more likely to be a four-step process: College, pre-internship, internship, then career.

The typical pre-internship is about three weeks long, in a remote format, with a curriculum featuring three key learning categories that allow students to begin developing professional workplace skills, familiarize themselves with industry-specific software and gain exposure to the culture of company sponsors through unique projects. Internship On Demand offers a mix of paid and unpaid pre-internships based on employer-established parameters.

Moldenhauer said, “With pre-internships, we’re moving the actual internship experience a step earlier. From an employer standpoint, hosting a 10-week intern and going through the entire recruitment process becomes a major investment. You're also paying for someone to come on site, and often paying for housing. We want to make sure those employers know who they're getting, that the candidates who come into the relationship are really committed and intend to be with the organization for the long run.”

From the student’s perspective, it’s very much the same idea. “Yes, it's awesome to get paid, but students want to work with the right team. They want to work on real projects and they want to know they are really aligned with the company’s values. With pre-internships, we’re able to do that,” Moldenhauer added.

DeVry’s Career Services team recently began working with Internship On Demand to develop internship and pre-internship opportunities for students in Bachelors Degrees in Computer Information Systems, Software Development, and Cybersecurity and Networking programs. Response from employers has been enthusiastic. DeVry students have participated in internships and pre-internships across various industries, with DeVry Career Services advisors helping them polish their resumes and put their best feet forward.

Alison Novak, DeVry's Sr. Employer Relations Advisor, observed that traditional internships haven’t always been a great fit for working adult students due to a lack of flexibility. Now, she says, “The remote, compact format of the pre-internships allows our non-traditional students to be proactive rather than reactive. As they’re doing their internships leading up to graduation, this becomes a huge confidence-booster, not just a resume-builder.”

Benefits to employers

For employers with specific hiring mandates and challenges such as reducing the time to hire new talent, pre-internships can be beneficial in several ways:

  • Cost-efficient connections: Pre-internships can be a powerful and cost-efficient recruitment tool to connect small and medium-sized companies with high-potential, career-focused students. Setting up a pre-internship on your own may be cost-prohibitive. The Internship On Demand platform enables you to compete for talent like the Fortune 500.

  • Reduced internship cost and better ROI: Internship on Demand uses its thorough vetting process to match pre-internship prospects with the needs of employers, so employers can be more confident in the career-readiness of their interns.

  • Greater diversity: By selecting pre-interns and interns from non-traditional student populations (like DeVry’s), employers can achieve better diversity. Internship On Demand CTO and co-founder Ryan McKernan weighed in on this important employer benefit, saying, “Across all of our pre-internship programs, over 60% of participants identify as first-generation or a minority candidate. For many employers, this can be a much-needed connection to a more diverse candidate pool.”

  • Exposure to company culture: The pre-internship exposes candidates to the company’s people and workplace culture in a casual and transparent way. Candidates come away from the experience with a deeper understanding of how they fit with a company’s culture, opportunities and work-life balance before they are hired.

  • Shorter time to hire: For some of their hardest-to-fill internship positions, employers partnering with Internship On Demand have cut their hiring time in half. Because they’ve already been a part of the employer’s workplace, new employees or interns who’ve completed pre-internship programs can be onboarded faster. This helps employers satisfy increasing speed-of-hire demands and fine-tune their hiring strategies. 

  • Reduced employee turnover: The NACE’s research indicates that internship programs support employee retention. Retention rates for employees who served as interns are higher at the one-year and five-year marks than those with no internship experience, and employees who completed an internship at the same company had even higher retention rates.1

Benefits to students and employee learners

By enabling them to gain experiential learning at an earlier stage in their development, pre-internships offer motivated, career-minded students several key benefits: 

  • Real-world testing: Pre-internships give students a chance to “test drive” their career paths in real-world occupational environments. Given the opportunity to alter their career plans at an earlier stage in their education, students can potentially save thousands of dollars in tuition cost and ensure they are graduating with the degree that aligns with their interests. 

  • Flexibility: For working-adult students, the flexibility of these virtual programs allows them to engage with the pre-internship experience while continuing to balance their commitment to education with a job, family and other obligations.

  • Confidence booster: As DeVry’s Kathaleen Emery noted, pre-internships can provide a substantial, “yes I can” emotional lift for non-traditional, working-adult students who may have never thought such a program to be an option. To date, 95% of Internship On Demand’s pre-internship participants claim an increased readiness for their next internship, or for full-time employment.

  • Networking opportunities: Pre-internships allow students to build professional networks in the same way conventional internships do, as they connect with other students and employer contacts who can support them at this early stage and later in their careers.

     

Why Partner with DeVry?

Your unique talent acquisition and development needs require more than a cookie-cutter approach. Working with DeVry and our Career Services team can bring you several clear benefits:

  1. Skilled, knowledgeable candidates: DeVry students learn the latest concepts, principles and hands-on skills in tech areas like cyber security, computer information systems, networking and software programming, and in accounting and business administration.

  2. Nationwide Support: DeVry off­ers over 40 programs and 85 specializations to students and alumni from across the country. 

  3. Career-Ready talent: Our Career Services team provides unwavering support to DeVry students, helping them to enhance their career-readiness and meet employers’ demanding expectations in rapidly advancing fields.

About Kathaleen Emery

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Manager of Employer Relations & Internships

Kathaleen is a high energy and collaborative business professional with over 20 years’ experience in higher education and recruiting. Kathaleen excels at building relationships with job seekers, and employer/community partners. She uses creativity to be successful in an ever-changing economic climate. She completed her MBA with Keller Graduate School of Management and holds her BS in Child & Family Services from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She also has her PHR and CPRW certifications.
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1. "2023 Internship &Co-Op Report,” National Association of College and Employers. March 2023.