How to build programs for interns & apprentices, Part I

So you’d like to start an apprenticeship or internship program at your work? Awesome! (If you aren’t convinced, I’m happy you clicked, but come back after reading this or this.) Wanting to start a program like this is an important first step. Actually implementing it is something else entirely. The amount of institutional change required can be significant, which compounds the more your company grows. There’s no better time to start than today! Every company’s readiness for these programs will vary, but this article lays the basic framework from 0–1. Most of my experience building programs is through software engineering and the nonprofit arts, but I’d argue this advice is applicable to any role with a little creativity on your part (or, I’d be happy to consult with your team!).

Part I covers the foundational guidance to research, garner support for and design your ideal program. Part II will cover hiring, preparing for the arrival of your program’s new hires, and performance management.

Some definitions

At first glance, internships and apprenticeships seem the same (and may even pay or be categorized identically in HR records), but they have important differences. The applicant populations are unique and customized programs will benefit those candidates and optimize their contributions to your organization.

• Internship: An internship provides entry-level industry experience for current students enrolled in higher education programs to complement their academic education. It offers employers cheaper/temporary employees, access to current academic theories that might benefit industry, and mentorship/retention opportunities for senior staff. Hiring occurs 4–9 months in advance of their start date. Typically internships are on 3–6 month terms, often summer, but many universities also support spring and fall programs. Some employers offer full-time roles or return internships but this is not the primary program goal because many interns aren’t ready to consider their long-term future yet.
• Apprenticeship: An apprenticeship provides entry-level training for candidates with non-traditional backgrounds, such as self-taught or re-training from other professions. It offers mentorship and on-the-job experience in exchange for lower-salary, growth-mindset workers and engagement/retention opportunities for senior staff. It’s impossible to generalize the candidate profile because of the variety of sources, but many have substantial prior work experience, are already local, and prefer to start very soon after interviewing. Apprenticeships are on 6–12 month terms depending on the role and any partner organizations’ requirements, and the primary goal is a path to full-time employment or referrals to other organizations by the end of the program.

The order in which you execute all these steps may vary depending on your organization, but at the very least, expect to explore all of them before hiring your first intern or apprentice.

Benchmark the industry status quo at competing companies

Many leaders want evidence that apprenticeship or internship programs are objectively successful elsewhere before they’ll spend valuable resources internally (unless you are lucky enough to find yourself at a company that values innovation beyond the product!). Define your vision of success clearly and show how your company’s values already align with these programs. You’ll know what format your leadership prefers, but this could be as simple as a list detailing company names and program profiles (basic benefits, org structure, size, pay scale, public opinion, etc…whatever you learn).

Benchmarking — generating a point of reference — is more effective if you showcase programs at companies of comparable size or product space, but it can also help to list everything you find if doing so shows your company needs to catch up. Use your search engine and networking skills to find the information you need (and if you’re not in HR, make friends with them — they benchmark a lot and often have helpful data or back-channel contacts at other companies).

Here’s a short list of varying company sizes and products with internship and/or apprenticeship programs to get your investigation started (you can also see some of these described in this Fast Company article):

• Pinterest (internship and a apprenticeships)
• Twilio (internships and a apprenticeships— Hatch)
• LinkedIn (internships and apprenticeships— REACH)
• Postmates (apprenticeship through TechSF)
• Yelp (internships — full disclosure, I built/ran that program from 2012–2016)

Investigate external partnerships to jumpstart your program

Depending where you’re located and what might suit your company, you may not have to reinvent the wheel entirely.

For apprenticeships: These programs (for now) can be very low-cost to implement. Most candidates are local, so they don’t require relocation benefits or housing stipends — unlike internships — and many organizations you might partner with aren’t charging to interview or hire their candidates (in some cases, they’ll pay you!). Public and private Departments of Labor and Workforce Development sponsor a variety of programs targeting re-training for veterans, caretakers/stay-at-home parents returning to the workforce, neurodiverse or candidates with disabilities, and many other underestimated candidates seeking a supportive path to their next career.

These organizations can offer employers out-of-the-box program designs and consultants to help integrate those programs into your workplace. So few companies in the tech industry currently offer apprenticeships that these programs offer ample free resources and time. Even if you don’t end up formalizing a partnership, many of these organizations are happy to take your call! A few to get you started:

• San Francisco/Bay Area: TechSF, Springboard Initiative, JVS
• New York: NY State Dept of Labor
• United States: Apprenti, US Department of Labor

For internships: In some ways internships are easier to implement because they are more familiar and popular, but they cost more than apprenticeships for a variety of reasons. Many universities have well-tested expectations for their students and partner companies, along with a range of formal or informal opportunities depending on your budget. Besides relocation and housing benefits for students, most universities expect you to pay a sizable sponsorship fee to participate in a formal co-op or internship program, but you could instead pay a smaller fee to simply list your job description on their careers pages, attend a career fair, or sponsor events in exchange for targeted promotion to their students.

Alumni are your best leads to learn about university programs and connect with on-campus liaisons. You’ll probably find plenty of employees with bachelor’s degrees at your company, but be aware that many universities (or disciplines you might target) are less demographically diverse than the general population. If you can offer relocation benefits to candidates, examine partnerships wherever your leads take you. If not, focus on local schools.

Build a coalition of influential mentors and managers

In Program Management 101, “build a coalition” is more commonly called “identify and engage your stakeholders.” In the art of persuasion, it’s “know your audience.”

Why is allyship important, especially if your boss already gave the go-ahead? Programs do not succeed in a silo, and change is hard. It’s impossible for one leader’s support, no matter how vocal, to carry the weight of everything your other stakeholders will need to do to make your program work. That weight will be even heavier if your stakeholders are reluctant, surprised or overwhelmed by what your program is asking of them.

However, gaining the support of an influential group of those stakeholders, along with an enthusiastic leader (such as a director or executive), will help mitigate organization-wide resistance to change and make room for all the unexpected wins that make program management a hard-earned joy.

Your ideal strategy will vary depending on your company’s mindset toward new ideas and what support you already have, but my preferred methods are 1:1 coffee/tea, walks, or chatting about these ideas at other events. Start building rapport with people you know and ask if they know anyone else you should talk to. Be judicious about calling large meetings unless you have a clear agenda — otherwise, wasting people’s time will hurt rather than help your cause. Besides teams you plan to place apprentices or interns on, you’ll also need to involve HR, Recruiting, Legal and Payroll teams to help with job creation, benefits assessment and hiring paperwork. Work with them closely to ensure your program design aligns with how they plan to execute it on the administrative side. For example, whether to classify these new hires as hourly or salaried will need to consider local labor regulations and any restrictions from external partnerships, but should also align with your program mission and values — are their mentors salaried? How will that affect their team dynamic?

In any stakeholder conversations, sincerely listen to any concerns or questions your stakeholders present. If you don’t know the answer, note it, do some research and don’t forget to follow up.

Building trust in your program starts with building trust in you. You need to be diligent, disciplined, thoughtful and optimistic about how your actions will impact those around you.

Design your ideal program

Copying and pasting another company’s or another program within your company isn’t likely to work. But all the benchmarking research you’ve done should give you a good basis of comparison for what might work (or not), given your company’s unique combination of culture & values, product and available resources.

• Consider your target audience — who are the ideal participants in this program? What are their needs & interests, and how can this program help meet them? Consider candidates and all the teams they might work with.
• Write a program mission statement that serves your stakeholders. It doesn’t have to be perfect or immutable, but the heart should be broad and specific enough to consistently align with goals, events or initiatives within that program. When I worked on Yelp’s intern program, we came up with “The Yelp Intern Program (YIP) aims to be a realistic, memorable and hopefully fun experience of working at Yelp and living in San Francisco.” It wasn’t future-proof as the program grew globally, and assumed a lot about the geographic origins of our interns, but the mission became our North Star, along with company values, to hold decisions against. YIP’s mission was how I justified both major expenditures like ensuring interns had laptops (like the rest of their teams) instead of desktops, and smaller decisions like where to take interns for brunch on the weekend.
• Articulate long and short-term goals that align with your mission and values. What outcomes do you want your program to achieve, and how will you measure those outcomes? Work backwards from the long-term goals to craft your short-term goals. Consider best and worst case scenarios, for everyone: if you’re starting an intern program and full-time conversions are one of your objectives, what impression would you like the interns who don’t get offers to walk away with (or, how far will your team go to train them enough to qualify for an offer)? Word of mouth is a high-impact recruiting tool and negative experiences can counter all your efforts.
• Outline a plan to execute those goals. In Yelp’s case, to execute our goals I defined event categories that aligned with the program mission and further guided programming. A good balance of events/initiatives across all the categories provided ample opportunities for professional development, local community engagement and experiencing company culture (short-term goals) — and through those events, my team built relationships with interns we leveraged to recruit or coach them later on (long-term goals). We measured event participation, how many viewed/read/clicked through our communications, and tracked a ton of feedback that we acted on, positive or negative, from all stakeholders.
• Assemble a budget, then get creative with it. Think big, then assume a much smaller percentage of your dream budget gets approved. Calculate both raw costs and cost per person for the expected program size, which can help give you a better idea of where to make meaningful adjustments. You may be able to leverage existing company resources for only the cost of time: using office common areas for gatherings (especially if your office serves snacks or coffee!) instead of going out can save the cost of renting space, buying refreshments and transportation — it can also be more convenient for participants. Grocery store delivery services are often far cheaper than catering if you have time to unpack and set up the goods (wash your hands!). If your program is multi-office or remote, include stakeholders beyond your location — does it make sense to physically bring everyone together, connect virtually, or host multiple events for each locality? Remember, your and your colleagues’ time is valuable, too — so calculate the tipping points where it’s worth the extra money to have an event catered or go offsite.

Present your findings & gain formal leadership support

If you’ve done your homework and think the company is ready to invest in this type of program, this step should be more of a formality than a hurdle.

You will likely know the best format for communicating with leadership at your company: presentation, written proposal, email, etc. Regardless of the method, put your research and planning to work. Start with the highlights— your best benchmarking information, your favorite ideas, most enthusiastic stakeholders, and the best arguments for how this program will impact the bottom line (also consider the risk-aversion model — what does the company risk by not proceeding?).

If you face pushback or hesitation, consider proposing a pilot program that costs less but produces a sufficient sample size of data to prove your hypothesis (the mission/goals). Bake in feedback loops and measurement tools to analyze decisions or outcomes. Most importantly, keep talking to everyone involved: you’ll gain far more valuable context from a coffee chat than you might consider asking in a survey. But beware: pilots are almost harder than investing head-on. Faulty experiment design can impede further progress if the results scare away your program’s support, and one program term may not be long enough to prove long-term goals. Talk to professional researchers (UX, data science or marketing can be good places to start if you’re looking internally) to help design your compromise to ensure the best data-informed results.

Coming up: Part II — Hire, prepare for, and onboard your new interns or apprentices

If you can’t wait for Part II, you can hire me (while you still can!) or read a related post I wrote about mentorship and onboarding — integral parts of your organization’s ecosystem that can make or break your program’s success and general employee retention.

About me: I used to be a technical recruiter and intern program manager at Yelp. Over the years, I noticed a sizable gap between how tech companies describe and execute employee experiences, from hiring processes through their last day. This gap means candidates and employees often succeed despite (not because of) the employer’s efforts — and this is a big problem if we hope to make real change in equal opportunity hiring.

I mediate between these worlds to narrow those gaps — by helping software engineering candidates find their best roles and prepare more effectively, and helping employers optimize their interview processes and employee engagement.

I’m based in San Francisco and a sucker for public transit, tasty cheese, fun facts and juicy novels. I’m on Twitter @keeterooni and LinkedIn.