In my last article, I discussed how Externships, a new form of work experience we invented at Extern, address common challenges that have hindered learning-integrated work experiences from becoming mainstream. Here, I examine some of the barriers preventing employers from engaging more early-talent candidates via internship programs and how the Externship, a new work experience model, is a great solution for resource-constrained teams.
There is huge demand for quality internship opportunities in the market, yet companies are not creating work experience "supply" to keep up with demand.
That's because asking companies to participate in a learning-based work program is akin to just asking them to donate their time as a volunteer. Expecting employees to find value in spending their time on work projects with large groups of students is a big ask.
Think about it.
What usually happens when someone says that the interns have arrived is that you hastily give them something to work on for a day, while you figure out what to really give them. Despite your best intentions to want to support and mentor young people, you start to think of the intern as more of a liability while you have that big project deadline looming. And next time that your HR manager asks if you’d like an intern, you are more likely to pass. Of course there are plenty of one off examples of exceptional students who come into an internship and blow everyone away -- or of managers who have the time and patience to support an intern and take them under their wing. But these are exceptions to the rule.
When considering the revamped Externship we discussed earlier, we have to look beyond general proclamations that “companies should build a bridge with higher education” or only listen to managers praising their internship programs filled with Harvard, Stanford, and Penn interns saying that in-person internships are the only effective approach. We have to look at the average situation at scale. We have to think about win-win scenarios. We have to think about incentives. We have to consider human psychology. We have to acknowledge the harsh realities of a free market system.
The Externship was created with these requirements in mind. It is designed to take all of the administrative burden off the plate of company employees and HR managers, while also acting as a curation funnel for the best ideas and outputs.
Imagine spending less time than it takes to manage one full-time intern, while getting the collective wisdom of hundreds of externs. It’s 1/10 the input for 100x the output.
The initial work is on the front end – scoping the project and expectations. Scoping appropriate project goals and outcomes requires effort and foresight, something a lot of employees may normally skimp on with interns, which often leads to mis-understanding. But the outcome is having aligned expectations.
Once project goals are defined, the employee manager just needs to show up every other week with externs as a kind of “guest lecturer” to talk about the project, the goals, the company, and answer questions (the fun part!). Behind the scenes, program managers and teaching assistants are taking the burden off of employees by answering all the little questions that come up from externs, from how to use a tool to the best way to conduct a particular analysis. In addition, students are getting trained by curriculum designed specifically with the project objectives in mind but also with replicable skill building in mind.
By the end, the program managers, teaching assistants, and extern peers have crowdsourced the best student work and the top students. Externs present a synthesized summary of their work, oftentimes with recommendations and insights, to company employees and leadership. These top externs can be considered for further engagement by the company’s hiring managers and recruiting teams, or identified as top candidates for internship pipelines (which we’ve seen with some of our Externship partners like AT&T, Home Depot, and Macquarie).
None of this is possible without thoughtful applications of software, user interfaces, data, workflow processes. Technology is needed to scale the training, workflow, and support of students as well as the administrative burden removed from the plates of employees and managers. This is where the magic happens. And now, with rapid iterations in LLMs and generative AI, an entirely new scale of extern support is being unlocked (more on that in a later post).
The key is to build an experience that is structured enough to provide repeatability, scalability, and quality outcomes for both companies and students without burdening busy employees.
The ideal Externship project will satisfy these principles:
Ideal projects today include market research, customer interviews, and product discovery & prototyping – all pillars of an effective product innovation strategy. Other ideal projects include cybersecurity, IT, business development, search engine optimization, content creation, strategic reviews, talent acquisition, brand design, and data analysis. Today, highly technical projects like software engineering break one of the principles above – externs either need more experience or managers need to spend a lot of time training over a very extended period of time. But technical Externships are on the way (first cybersecurity module will launch by end of year). But more importantly, software engineering IS NOT a career of the future due to advances in generative AI and LLMs. Knowing how to prompt and "speak" to LLMs to create software will be the new skill.
What many of these projects have in common is that they require a lot of human hours to actually engage with research, customers, potential customers, and run experiments. Whether you are a startup founder trying to get to product market fit, or a Chief Product Officer at a Fortune 500 responsible for a major product or new feature launch, or a Head of Marketing conducting research on market expansion, you need to validate your market, customer, and product concept before investing significant time and money into building anything. This process cannot be skipped (although many do and end up building something nobody wants). But it takes time that leaders and their teams usually don’t have when deadlines are looming and budgets are limited.
In my next article, I discuss the economic power of professional experience and how history indicates that periods of rapid economic growth have frequently followed moments when young people were able to gain in-demand skills.
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