Students as staff: the value of interns in the UWS Careers and Cooperative Education office
UWS Careers & Cooperative Education (CCE) has employed student interns within their office for close to ten years.
Staff originally outsourced specialist short-term projects to students with specific skill sets, however, over time this has developed into ongoing work in defined internship roles.
At present, the CCE office employs two HR Students as recruitment assistants for the internship and Jobs on Campus program, a marketing student as a Careers Assistant providing support to the three Career Education Consultants, and two communication students in social media and events internships.
Hosting internships within the CCE Office is mutually beneficial and represents a model of best practice in developing career ready graduates with practical, degree-relevant workplace experience.
Benefit to Tertiary Students:
Benefit to graduate employers
Benefit to tertiary institutions
The UWS model, refined over ten years, provides a blue-print for other institutions looking to establish internship programs. The Careers unit has established comprehensive and robust recruitment processes, focusing on candidate development.
Innovation is demonstrated as follows:
Staff originally outsourced specialist short-term projects to students with specific skill sets, however, over time this has developed into ongoing work in defined internship roles.
At present, the CCE office employs two HR Students as recruitment assistants for the internship and Jobs on Campus program, a marketing student as a Careers Assistant providing support to the three Career Education Consultants, and two communication students in social media and events internships.
Hosting internships within the CCE Office is mutually beneficial and represents a model of best practice in developing career ready graduates with practical, degree-relevant workplace experience.
Benefit to Tertiary Students:
- Offers students the opportunity to gain paid, degree-relevant experience prior to graduation
- Safe working environment with employer sensitive to the needs of students in relation to their students
- Flexible working hours
- Allows students to put ‘theory into practice’ and engage more thoroughly with academic coursework
- Developing employability/ soft skills in a structure workplace
- Access to professional mentors
- Greater sense of place at university
- Allows students to ‘road test’ career path
- Access to careers staff and resources to assist in managing their own career
- Careers unit is a diverse workplace, students have access to a range of experiences across the unit (large events etc)
- Interns are treated with respect and are valued as equal team members within the unit
- Interns are recognised at a high profile annual Awards Function and supervisors act as a referee for subsequent employment opportunities
- Interns have ownership of a role with clearly defined tasks and responsibilities
Benefit to graduate employers
- Students exit the internship with desired soft-skills (team work, professional communication etc)
- A measure of ‘quality control’, ensuring graduates hit the ground running and have a better understanding of employer expectations
Benefit to tertiary institutions
- Represents a flexible, workable model of student employment across a large institution
- Staffing strategy
- Reinforces a positive brand in the community (the university as an employer endorses their students and graduates)
- Transforms the ‘career-ready’ graduates tag from rhetoric to reality
- Represents a collaborative approach to student development, utilizing the expertise of Careers staff and working closely with Academics
- Promotes a positive and vibrant workplace culture (mentoring up)
- Students bring current ideas to the workplace which help to inform connected marketing strategies
The UWS model, refined over ten years, provides a blue-print for other institutions looking to establish internship programs. The Careers unit has established comprehensive and robust recruitment processes, focusing on candidate development.
Innovation is demonstrated as follows:
- Careers service is not operating in a silo, independent of the world of student work. It is a living breathing ‘employer’ of students, practicing what it preaches and actively promoting the value students and graduates from this institution bring to the workplace.
- Growing our own graduates by giving them responsibility and developing their potential.