Intern induction: a best practice route to high-potential graduate employees

Oakwood International trainers have won the opportunity to design and deliver part of the induction process for a large cohort of interns for a UK-based multinational organisation. It’s interesting work.

Some background. Internships are fixed-term unpaid or low paid ‘office’ jobs done by students in their holidays or following graduation. The students involved are often high performers and their living and travelling costs often provided by their families. They often get the internships through family or business connections and their recruitment and induction is often unsystematic and unregulated, no more than an informal agreement between their ‘managers’ and their parents.

In the USA, internships are a way of life in politics, the media, the creative industries and many large companies: a means for young people to get work experience and make connections in high status organisations; and a means for organisations to get high-volume, high-quality work at very low cost.

But internships have come in for some mixed press in the UK recently. Nick Clegg, deputy Prime Minister, announced some weeks ago that he wanted to regulate the practice, so that internships are available to any able students who want them, and not just to those with wealthy families and connections to top people. Clegg’s boss, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, disagreed, saying he saw no problem with the current state-of-affairs. He argued that adding layers of complexity to something not important enough, or not broke enough, to need fixing seemed a waste of energy in these cost-aware times.

But the work Oakwood is involved with is nothing like this. The hundreds of students involved have all gone through a rigorous recruitment process designed and managed by the organisation’s HR team. They are high performers but their family connections and private wealth have not been a factor in their recruitment. They will be paid a living wage during their ten-week internship. They will each receive one week concentrated off-site induction, involving intensive training in the organisation and divisional mission, vision, strategy, structure, culture and practice, as well a wider introduction to effective business behaviour (provided by the Oakwood trainers). Once in role they will have regular one-to-ones with their managers and they will also be required to arrange and run separate meetings with other senior managers in the business.

Past experience within the business has shown that:

• the majority of these interns go on to become the organisation’s high-potential graduate recruits
• the majority of the organisation’s high-potential graduate intake come from this intern programme

In other words, the money and time invested on this intern programme is more than paid back by the work of the graduates eventually recruited as permanent staff.

Watch this space for further reports about this programme and Oakwood’s involvement.