Hi, I am trying to understand the challenges that come up while finding Project management internships. Please share your inputs if you have recently joined or been offered a Project management internship. If you offered internships, how was your experience, what is your motivation behind offering an internship, and where do you find prospects for internships? If you’re interested, I would like to speak to you more about Project Management internships. Saving Changes...
Interns are generally assisting PMs or PMOs, and learning more about the business where they are temporarily employed. Offering internships is often driven by 2 considerations:
1) Encouraging people to come back once they finish their education. Interns are often more an investment in the future, than a short term productivity boost. Our interns will report on their experience at the end of their stay, something we jokingly refer to as "What I did on my summer vacation with Company XYZ."
2) An exception to 1) is bringing in people with current technology skills that can help develop tools in the short period where the intern is employed. Need a new custom database? Hire an intern! They can often invent solutions faster than it would take to get IT to even get the project in their queue.
Job fairs are always a popular place to find prospective interns. Saving Changes...
I introduced a model for using interns in a backoffice supporting role for PMs. This worked well in various locations. The interns were supporting PMs in daily tasks like collecting time sheets - chasing team members to provide them - helping with updating plans and financials, etc
This model was very helpful in many ways, the PMs got more time for managing stakeholders, risk etc and in general were more satisfied with their role as they could delegate some of the tedious work. The interns learned a lot about project management. The PMs also benefited from having someone the ask "silly" questions.
We hired some of the best interns later as associate PMs and they had a kick-start as they knew the culture, the processes and the people in the company.
How to identify the good candidates ? Select a good university and find interesting candidates and then trust your gut feeling.
I also had a model where few PMs did the interviews and presented a ranking of the candidates. That worked well. Saving Changes...
We hired a project management intern. We found her through a university co-op program. We are very active in co-op inter programs so it is both an opportunity to supplement the team and build our pipeline for future potential full time employees. Saving Changes...
Latha Thamma reddiSr Product and Portfolio Management (Automation Innovation)| DXC TechnologyMckinney, Tx, United States
