IT companies do internships to find new employees, programmers. This is one of the most common reasons.

Internships are time-consuming. Unless you put an intern in a department and then talk to him or her the next time you sign reports. For a real internship you need to spend a lot of resources: organize the workplace, come up with a project and tasks, answer a thousand questions every day.

With an internship, you’ll be able to hire junior-level employees. The main plus in hiring juniors: the intern is like a white sheet. It’s easier to teach the way the company needs them than it is to retrain them. But you have to remember that it will take more time for the Juno to start showing results and being useful.

A trainee will not work full-time. The trainee is a student and will return to the university in September. Are you willing to take the person on part-time for the rest of their studies? We are willing, but we make a verbal agreement: not to abandon the studies. The university provides a good foundation that should not be neglected.

Trainees need mentors. They must have time: you should allow 1-2 hours per day for one trainee. Even more important is the desire to be a mentor, to pass on your experience, to teach, and to answer questions. Without quality mentoring, the effectiveness of the internship will drop precipitously, as the intern will be mostly left to himself.

You need to come up with a project that the intern will work on. This can be training tasks not related to your development, or real tasks from the backlog.

If nobody is going to take care of the intern and there are no interesting tasks for him or her, there is no sense in inviting him or her. For the company, the intern will be more of a burden, and he or she will be bored. He will not have the most pleasant impressions of the company, and even when he becomes a middling, he may not consider you as an employer.

If you pay enough attention to the trainee, give him a great project, teach him, show your interest, create the right atmosphere, he will tell his friends how cool he spent this summer month and what he learned. Loyalty to the company will be higher.

How we organized the practice

Lined up processes and assigned roles.

When there were fewer students, a couple of people were enough to organize the internship.

This year the practice has scaled up, there are more organizers. A difficulty arose right away: it turned out that everyone was in charge of a small part and it was not quite clear who was responsible for what. For example, there was no complete picture of what trainees would come to us and how many of them there would be: one colleague said that there would be 10 trainees, another said that we were expecting another 20, and then suddenly there was a meeting with the third “batch” of trainees.

To keep the process from descending into chaos, we assembled a kick-off meeting where we thought through and described the entire process. No complicated diagrams were made – we sketched everything on a whiteboard without too much detail. The result was a list of tasks and nine roles needed on the project.

Administrative Roles.

Practice Manager – signals the start, defines the purpose and scope of the practice, approves projects, gets involved in difficult moments.

Project Manager – organizes, coordinates all participants, manages the process.

Recruiter – searches for interns and then hires them.

KDP – handles personnel matters in the process of admission to the internship.

Mentor – acting programmer-teacher.

Customers – give a project to students to implement and accept the result.

Project Managers – interact with the client, organize the work of mentors and interns.

Mentors are the key persons in the internship, we don’t leave an intern without support. This year there were 31 mentors for 54 students: everyone was given enough attention. Before working with students, future mentors go through a corporate mentoring school. There they learn how to build a training program for a new employee, transfer experience, set tasks, accept results – and they even learn the basics of andragogy.

There is a separate person for each role. The project manager was responsible for the entire practice. He gathered information from all participants, created a chat room, common tables, and files. Now all news and questions flowed to him. This solution was good, except for the time commitment: For two months it took 4-5 hours per day for the project manager to coordinate more than 100 participants: trainees, mentors, customers, and people from other departments, such as administration.