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:

• Smith+Nephew has posted Micro-Internships as a way to audition talent at schools nationwide to see who is a good fit for their sales development program.  This has engaged students at schools where they don’t recruit and students in majors they normally wouldn’t consider all while putting money in the students’ pockets.  More importantly, though, after several iterations of this program, they see an average cost per hire of under $600 and all of these students are still in their full-time role after a year!
• Manufacturing companies like Trane Technologies and Northrop Grumman have engaged students in projects that required both technical and non-technical expertise such as research, data analysis, and writing. Trane has focused on engaging students from HBCUs and other minority backgrounds while Northrop Grumman has found success with engaging students nationwide who may not have heard of or considered their company.  According to one Northrop Grumman manager, “The recent hire we found through Parker Dewey was worth the cost of the entire program.”
• School-focused programs like those at Florida A&M University (FAMU) and Swarthmore College are engaging students across all majors and class years. FAMU has shared Micro-Internships with hundreds of its corporate partners and local small businesses.  The companies benefit from reaching talented FAMU students and recent grads, and the students use Micro-Internships as a stepping stone for longer-term opportunities. So far this year alone, FAMU students have received over $60,000 from Micro-Internships (and counting).

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:

• A software training provider embedding Micro-Internships as a way to help its learners demonstrate what they’ve learned through real-world projects with its corporate customers.
• A university who is hosting tech-focused projects to help students and companies recognize the value a liberal arts education can give to companies in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.
• A company funding Micro-Internships specifically for students at a public university with a large population of students from underrepresented backgrounds who are historically not able to participate in traditional internships due to other work and family obligations.

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.