Last week, Parker Dewey Founder and CEO Jeffrey Moss shared some of his takeaways from NACE 2023. One that particularly stood out to me in the sessions I attended is how managers from both companies and schools are increasingly asking for the business case to justify the effectiveness of their student engagement strategies. With continuous change happening in the labor market, it’s never been more important for recruiters and career services professionals to demonstrate a clear, data-proven return on their investment for these initiatives.
For our corporate and university partners, the business case for Micro-Internships is easy to justify, particularly for those who are implementing Micro-Internship programs at scale. To highlight some of these programs, we hosted two webinars last week which focused on these specific case studies. In case you missed it, here are the recordings for the session that featured company examples and one that featured examples from colleges and universities.
While these webinars showcased many examples of these successful student engagement programs, each were unique in their goals, budget and implementation. Many of these programs started small with four-figure budgets that still allow dozens of students to receive real paid, experiential learning opportunities and all can quickly and easily scale to engage and support more students. None of these are asking the students to commit to hours of work without any real interaction with a company, mentorship, or financial reward which allows them to be accessible and engage a diverse array of students. And all are generating tangible value to the organizations who are working with these students.
The flexibility of Micro-Internship Programs is part of the ways they are successful. Just to highlight a few examples:
For Swarthmore, their SwatWorks Micro-Internship program focuses on connecting Swarthmore alumni, parents and other “friends” in short-term projects during students’ academic breaks. This program’s popularity has created such value for all stakeholders that Swarthmore continues to add resources to expand it further. For alumni, many are enjoying the tremendous value of the Micro-Interns’ support that they are self-funding additional projects year round.
As we saw at NACE, the number of ways to engage early-career talent are as diverse as students themselves. I continue to be amazed at the various new ways that companies and schools are using Micro-Internships and am excited to highlight some of the programs we’ll be launching in the upcoming months:
We are excited to power these initiatives and many other programs and to see the cost-effective, tangible impact they make on students and organizations.