With our rebranding to Extern, I’d like to unpack our vision of a world where everyone, regardless of background, can explore a career through real professional experience.
The past few years, our team has been hard at work talking to students, talking to companies, running experiments, building and iterating product, reviewing nearly 200,000 applications for Externships, and delivering over 20,000 student externs with multi-week Externships on behalf of nearly 30 companies including Fortune 500s and Fortune 100s.
The result to date has been an enormous amount of learning by our team, happier students (NPS increased from 64 to 71 between 2022 and 2023), happier companies (NPS increased from 77 to 81 between 2022 and 2023), incredible internship and job outcomes for extern alumni, an accelerating rate of Externship applications for us to keep up with (applications exceeded 40% of all of 2023 in just the first two months of 2024), and a more resilient and scalable version of the Externship experience.
With recent advances in machine learning and generative AI, we are now able to rethink and re-architect the way we work, learn, and build professional experience. At Extern, we are harnessing software, UI, experts, and new capabilities with Large Language Models to create accessible professional experiences that can eventually support students and career switchers in any field with management, feedback, and expertise.
Our mission is simple: to help anyone discover and launch their career through professional experiences available anywhere at any time, and to do this in the context of a rapidly changing world and economy, driven by rapid changes in AI that must be harnessed in everyday work.
We believe that the best form of career discovery is real professional experience, and our remote Externships provide just that - the ability to test drive a company, a function, or an industry in a safe, risk-free way.
We are not just a career certificate, career simulation, or job training platform. We are not just a recruiting platform that connects students with existing work projects or internships. We are creating professional experiences that would not exist otherwise.
Imagine a world of limitless opportunity. Our vision at Extern is a world where anyone can access work experience as a form of education – no matter their background, experience, or socio-economic status. We envision a world where stress, fear, privilege, and inequality are eliminated from the career process.
At Extern, we've pioneered the Remote Externship, a distinct evolution in professional development and work. Externships let people quickly build their resumes with real work experiences, remotely, while giving companies expert-designed, turnkey projects that drive business outcomes.
Unlike traditional internships or short term jobs, a Remote Externship is a structured, short-term project that large cohorts of students can undertake from anywhere at any time, collaborating with global companies. Extern projects, spanning 4-6 weeks, are designed to offer real-world, strategic challenges – allowing inexperienced students to tackle meaningful work scenarios.
For companies, Externships are an opportunity to harness the innovative ideas of a diverse talent pool under the design of industry experts, while students gain tangible work experience and enhance their resumes and skill sets. This symbiotic relationship not only bridges the gap between academia and industry but also reimagines the landscape of work, talent engagement, and talent acquisition.
We’ve figured out how to blend a unique combination of experts with inexperienced talent and then put them through a transformer of sorts – a new type of assembly line to produce work that nobody thought students could produce. This is possible because of the diverse backgrounds that our team brings in AI, engineering, product, business, and education.
Our remote Externships are designed to be a catalyst for the change we envision. They provide students with the opportunity to gain practical experience in their chosen field, from anywhere in the world at any time of the year. This not only breaks down geographical and time constraint barriers but also opens up a world of opportunities for students from underserved backgrounds that did not exist before.
Read my previous article about why Extern developed Externships as a new form of work experience. Or read the next article in this series: “Oh no, the interns are here!” Why Busy Employees Mean Companies Cannot Upskill Emerging Talent
.jpg)
