Internships – the advantages and disadvantages?

Internships are a good way of gaining fresh perspectives on problems you face; discovering good quality, tried and test future employees, managers and leaders.

Consider these internship statistics from the National Association of Colleges and Employers' (NACE) 2009 Experiential Education Survey:

• 67.7% of 2007-08 interns were offered fulltime positions.
• 83.6% of these offers were accepted.
• 35.3% of employers' fulltime, entry-level college hires came from their internship programs.

Through an internship the intern you hire will have some time to gain experience, while you, as an employer will value and decide whether you can keep the intern or let him or her go. An internship program is a year-round recruiting tool. Fall internships, summer internships, semester internships, and quarterly internships, no matter which ones, implementing an internship program means you have an ongoing list of future fulltime employees. During the internship, the intern can develop himself and creating a network of useful contacts while at the same time understand the market and industry better. Moreover, college campuses are viral societies. This means that if your organization or company impresses one group of interns, word will quickly spread. Soon you'll be able to pick the most talented and hard-working intern from a big pool of candidates. A recent report also finds that employers think those without any work or less experience are less or not likey to find a gratuate job, thus giving this opportunity to recent graduates will be beneficial for you.

Hhiring someone as an intern is the most effective way to evaluate their potential as a fulltime employee. When you "try" candidates via a semester or summer internship, you make fewer mistakes when it comes to fulltime staff recruiting; you avoid the pitfall of training a new hire, only to find out they're not good for your your organization or company. Starting an internship program lets you benefit from added manpower, while more accurately assessing candidates.
 

What internships are not, are opportunities to acquire cheap labour. Sometimes, employers confuse the term internship with no-paid employees and thus they usually make interns' experience an unpleasant one, by assigning to them really repetitive and boring tasks to do. The tasks assigned to interns are generally basic, low-skill duties, which rarely utilize the progressive skill level of the individual. While some internships provide an atmosphere for interns to put their specialty to use, most interns will acquire knowledge and experience relevant to their expertise by observing the paid professionals around them. Thus the intern doesn't have the chance to develop as a person and find out what he likes as a focus area.

Research