* Summer work experience
School’s out for the summer and many kids’ minds have turned to how they can get some work experience and make some extra money (which can turn out to be quite a nice sum for some – would you believe $30,000 for a summer internship doing some Java coding? A parent told me that is how much their daughter got paid for her Java skills one summer!).
Unfortunately, there may not be enough of the traditional entry-level job openings for all the high school and college kids who want to intern this summer. According to a recent Web poll conducted by CompTIA, 43% of the 261 respondents to questions about interns said they would be hiring such temporary workers in their IT departments this summer. And nearly 16% said that they would be hiring 10 or more individuals.
However, 12.6% of organizations that have used summer IT interns in the past did not plan to do so this year. And 44% said they do not use interns or summer hires in their IT departments.
There could be a number of reasons why past intern employers are not hiring this year, including the outsourcing of some of the help desk and other entry level jobs that interns would have carried out, or the automation of some of the tasks, says Gretchen Koch, director of CompTIA’s skills development programs. However, there still remains a need to fill similar-level technician jobs that require face-to-face interaction with end users, such as on-site troubleshooting she adds.
To this end, CompTIA runs the Education to Careers (E2C) program in which it partners with not-for-profit educational organizations to provide students with the knowledge necessary to attain certain CompTIA certifications.
Under the program, member institutions, such as high schools and community colleges run courses to prepare students for six CompTIA examinations: A+, Network+, Security+, Linux+, iNet+ (Internet and online technologies) and Server+. The company is also considering including CompTIA’s HTI+ (home technology integration) certification under the E2C program to address the need for savvy consumer technology technicians by consumer electronics retailers, for instance.
The program offers members help with setting guidelines to establishing mentoring/internship programs, and member schools can provide their students with discount vouchers to pay toward the exams.
Coming back to internships, I’d be interested to know whether your organization employs IT interns and if so, what has been the benefit to the company? Offering an opening to an intern shouldn’t be about getting in cheap labor to do the work no one else wants to do. The best companies give supervised practical experience that is valuable to the student. And IT managers get personal satisfaction from teaching the next generation IT professionals that there’s a different side to what they read about in their textbooks (see this story about an IT internship program in the City of Seattle: http://www.networkworld.com/careers/2002/0318man.html?rl).
If you’re interested in hiring interns, CompTIA’s Koch suggests hitting up your local schools, department of education or the local chamber of commerce for leads on where to find some young and enthusiastic workers.
