SUMMARY
As a student, I have experienced and watched friends have internship opportunities that totally fell short of their expectations. Interning is hard and the process is exhausting, but is something all young adults go through. Internships are crucial to professional development and the cornerstone to ensuring students have a smooth transition from the classroom to the workplace. Unfortunately more often than not, companies take on interns and have no idea what to do with them. This results in a loss of time, money, and resources.
challenge
There are three stakeholder groups: executives, HR, and interns, each with different needs and opportunities. I looked at the intersection between these three and mainly focused on how to get interns to engage with all levels of people within the company, with the HR department as the facilitator. Some of the opportunity spaces include understanding opportunities older generations might lack knowledge of, increasing talent retention rates, gaining exposure to senior executives, and allowing interns to work with more real-life company material to which they can share their opinion on.
Outcome
The Pitch is a TEDX-style event where interns have 5 minutes to pitch a idea, industry trend or prediction to a panel of executives or employees within a company. This gives interns a chance to work on their public speaking and prove themself to be a strong employee and also gives executives the chance to discover new ideas, see how peoples brains work, and make connections with the future employees of the company. The goal of this is to address that current internship program structures are failing which leads to decreasing rates of innovation, engagement, retention rates, and workplace culture. We want interns to feel fulfilled.
MEET THE Designers:
