3 Reasons Your Business Can Benefit From Summer Internships

Sometimes what your business needs is a little bit of breaking up the routine by bringing in people that have a different perspective so you’re forced to take a look at your process. 

To bring someone into your business that has a different perspective as an employee, you can either hire someone who has management experience from a different company that can help you understand some of the things you may be missing, or if you’re looking for a much cheaper alternative That can even provide you with an inter-generational perspective, you may want to look at having a summer internship program.

If you haven’t had a summer internship program before, you may find yourself having a bit of a learning curve and wondering how you can best utilize your new “part time employees”. But with a little thought and planning, you can easily get a lot of value for your company out of your interns and learn a lot that you might not have otherwise.

So let’s start off by listing three of the main benefits that you and your company can gain as a result of bringing on one or several summer insurance. And then once we cover the benefits, we’ll give you some advice on how to structure your internship programs so you can make the most of your internship potential!

#1: Low Overall Cost

In some cases, having an internship may be cheaper than having an employee. You can structure your internship as either an unpaid position, or you can pay them less than you would typically pay a more experienced employee.

While a good amount of an intern’s experience may be taken up by training and getting to know the ins and outs of your business, they still give you plenty of time to have them work on actual business tasks that would have to be completed by another more well paid employee regardless.

While there can be benefits to having the position be unpaid, you will likely attract much better candidates if you make it a paid internship position. And unless you are a much larger and well established organization with an existing reputation, you may lose some goodwill if it appears you’re just trying to get cheaper labor.

#2: Simplifying Your Process

When you’re used to doing things a certain way in your business, it can get easy to lose sight of why you started doing a process that way in the first place. Bringing in an intern or even multiple interns forces you to train younger and less experienced employees which can help you understand some of the weaknesses you may have in your training process and overall communication as an organization.

If something isn’t simple enough for your new interns to understand it probably needs to be reworded so that it’s easier for your staff and new employees in general to understand your training. And if your interns don’t understand how you’re talking to your employees or your customers, you probably need to look at simplifying some of the language that you use even as you’re providing your products or services.

One of the most important benefits of simplifying your process is you are forced to dumb down why you do what you do and the value of the products you provide to your customers. Often as business owners we get caught up in how we think and talk about what we do that sometimes we can lose focus on how our customers actually think about our industry. Bringing in fresh eyes and ears into your business can help pull you out of your little bubble and think about how people from the outside communicate about your industry, helping you communicate with your customers better overall.

#3: Learning From Another Generation’s Perspective

The younger generations spend a lot of their time online and on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Meanwhile, the older generations tend to spend more time on more established platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Consequently, your business probably has a better Facebook and LinkedIn marketing strategy then it does on Instagram or TikTok. And while some of these newer platforms are simpler in theory, if your current employees and leadership don’t understand how these platforms work, you may not even understand what type of opportunities you’re missing.

Even when it comes to the kind of content your business puts out, get your intern’s insight into what kind of content they find most engaging. And if you or your staff don’t like being on video to market your business, get your interns to do some of the video work for you!

A lot of entrepreneurs feel less comfortable getting on video themselves, but having younger faces on your content can help you create video content to begin with and also mix up the expectation that your customers and referral partners have of your brand, in a good way!

Making the Most of Your Interns

So now that we’ve covered some of the main reasons your company should look at hiring summer interns, let’s cover a few things your company can do to make the most of the opportunity!

• Have a plan and a purpose. What do you want them to do for your company?
• Make education a priority. What experience will your intern(s) gain from the internship? This can help you market the opportunity to better internship candidates as well.
• What team members will you want to involve in training and working with the interns? Map out specifically what you want their involvement to look like when coordinating with the interns

This certainly is not an all-exhaustive list, but answering some of these basic questions at the outset can help you set the tone and lead into other areas you’ll want to clarify ahead of having these interns start.

Wrapping Things Up

Regardless of whether or not you’ve had an internship program in the past, these 3 main reasons for having summer interns can help you revitalize your business and see things from a different perspective so you can stay up to date with current trends and be more profitable well into the future!

For more fresh ideas on how to keep your business up to date and take advantage of market opportunities, make sure to sign up for email updates and check out our latest content on the MyCorporation blog!