An internship is a classic term describing the path of development of a young specialist in the process of starting his career.
Each of us, one way or another, went through this difficult and exciting, but, in any case, an interesting period.
Having behind me many years of experience in creating, managing and interacting with teams, I want to share my experience and principles of how to create a team development tool from a familiar process.
In the field of digital products, we have a constantly growing, changing volume of knowledge and approaches, which, often, cannot be ensured by training in the process of regular training and the arrival of a ready-made specialist who just needs to be brought up to date on his responsibilities in a new position.
A feature of creating innovative products is the training of specialists virtually “from scratch”, to a greater extent not on the basis of fundamental knowledge, but on the basis of practical cases and on the basis of advanced experience with maximum involvement in a real product.
I started my work at the beginning of the 2000s with a training format under the guidance of those who already had experience in the emerging field of Internet projects.
I successfully develop this internship format in the future, constantly transforming, in my teams.
Basic principles and approaches:
Stage I - selection of candidates:
I invite someone to small projects or startups (often as part of personal networking), and someone takes the initiative himself.
In large companies, the selection of candidates takes place through programs organized by HR and, in this case, the final selection takes place from the list of candidates.
Stage II - selection of potential interns:
A test task before a personal meeting, which, as best as possible, will tell you about theoretical knowledge (hard skills).
A personal meeting or communication gives a clear understanding of personal qualities (soft skills) and an idea of how suitable the candidate is and will be able to “fit” into the current processes, share and adopt the “spirit” of the team.
Improvisation from the candidate. An interesting case was in Vodafone Ukraine - when candidates created their presentation video business card and revealed their personalities through creativity.
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It is important to understand that the process of selection and training of interns to the junior level and above, as well as the system of mentoring and internal development of specialists to the next levels of professional competence, is not an attempt to save money on attracting ready-made relevant roles from the market, but a more complicated way of building an outstanding team and continuous development of the entire team.
The mentoring system is much more time-consuming and resource-intensive than the usual adaptation of ready-made specialists. But this is an extremely promising investment in intangible benefits and efficiency in the future.