Transforming internships to benefit more students, employers, and institutions.

Internships provide a vital bridge between education and the workforce. For college students, they provide opportunities to explore careers and industries, gain hands-on experience, develop professional networks, and develop critical people skills—all which enhance career readiness and employability. In fact, a LinkedIn survey found that college graduates who held internships were 23 percent more likely to start a full-time job within six months of graduation than their peers who did not participate in an internship.   

The benefits of internships extend beyond students. Employers gain access to skilled individuals who can fill their pipeline for early-career talent. In addition, colleges and universities can offer their students experiential learning opportunities that will help with their job prospects and potentially impact key institutional metrics. By improving career placement rates, schools will be able to attract and recruit more students. And by engaging students in project-based learning, institutions may increase their retention and success rates. With internships, everyone wins.

But unfortunately, there’s an imbalance in the internship landscape that is keeping all parties from achieving the full benefit of these programs. According to Expanding Internships: Harnessing Employer Insights to Boost Opportunity and Enhance Learning, a research report by the Business Higher Education Forum (BHEF), 4.6 million students, many who are minorities, wanted an internship in 2023 but could not secure one. Ironically in the same year, nearly one in three employers reported that some of their internship positions went unfilled. This data reveals that today’s internship programs are not fully optimized to serve students, employers, or institutions. 

There’s a better way forward.

As an organization whose mission is to eliminate underemployment, Riipen has a unique perspective on this issue. Founded in 2013 to address college students’ challenge of needing experience to get a job but not being able to get a job without experience, we’ve spent over a decade exploring innovative ways to give all students access to the experiential learning opportunities that can help them achieve fulfilling and successful careers.  

Below we’ll share our insights from working with employers, institutions, and students on how the internship ecosystem can better collaborate to make internships more beneficial for all.  

Purpose-built technology can scale internship programs.

In its survey of 2,700 U.S. employers, BHEF found that 76% of employers offer internship programs and that operational challenges limit their ability to expand these programs(48%). Operational challenges include recruiting interns, determining appropriate work/tasks, and allocating staff to supervise interns. These obstacles were particularly acute for small and medium sized organizations. 

Intermediaries in the internship ecosystem have developed technology solutions which address these challenges. Platforms exist that match students with employer projects and centralize communications to help streamline recruiting and hiring. And AI tools have been developed to generate guidelines for creating suitable projects, job descriptions from templates, and project plans with scheduled deliverables to automate time-consuming, manual processes. By leveraging purpose-built technology, employers can fill their open intern roles, expand their programs, and benefit more students.

Collaboration between employers and institutions is key.

Employers are eager to partner with academic institutions to grow their internship programs. In the BHEF survey, 56% of employers said that partnerships with four-year universities would help them expand while 37% said that partnerships with two-year colleges would be of assistance. 

Colleges and universities also benefit from these partnerships. With increased focus on the value of degrees, academic institutions are expanding their work-based learning programs (WBL) including curriculum embedded project based internships. These initiatives give students the opportunity to apply the skills that they’ve learned in the classroom in a real-world environment, improving their career readiness and job prospects, as well as their workforce outcomes. 

But with declining enrollments, finding the resources to expand these programs has been a challenge for many schools. Some institutions are working with intermediaries to facilitate connections with employers who are actively looking for talented college student interns.  

Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) did just that. The school strives to incorporate work-integrated learning in its curriculum, but it needed assistance with a new program. 

“The Clean Energy program was brand new and we weren’t connected to a lot of businesses,” explained April Coe, Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Coordinator at NAIT. So the school partnered with Riipen to gain access to hydrogen or carbon-focused companies.The arrangement was a success for all stakeholders. “The companies had such good experiences with our students that they've come back to us outside of WIL with additional student requests,” Coe shared. “[And our students] were excited to have the opportunity to work with diverse companies.” 

By increasing collaboration between employers and academic institutions, not only do both benefit but more students gain valuable real-world experience.  

Today’s students have different needs.

While supply constraints are one reason 4.6 million students were unable to participate in  internship opportunities last year, it is not the only reason. For some students, the traditional internship model simply does not meet their needs. 

BHEF’s survey found that most internships have a traditional structure, with two-thirds of programs taking place over a semester or a summer and 67 percent requiring students to work in the office. For students with families or who depend on a steady paycheck, many who come from traditionally underserved populations, this model is just not accessible.   

But when employers and institutions collaborate to co-create new internship models, more students can participate and reap the benefits. Virtual project-based internships or micro internships that take place over a shorter time period, for example, are promising options. 

Bay Path University, a commuter school in Massachusetts, is a well-known leader in WBL. It is committed to giving all its students the opportunity to participate in experiential learning opportunities. Its students are busy—on average its 18–24-year-old students work 25 hours a week and its 25+ students work 35 hours a week. “They can’t take time off for a traditional internship experience,” Jeremy Anderson, Vice President of Learning, Innovation, Analytics & Technology, explained.

So, Anderson worked with Riipen to create a virtual project-based internship program where students can work asynchronously on employer projects to accommodate their busy schedules. The program’s platform also gives the university the flexibility to set timelines in collaboration with employers so projects can be divided into smaller chunks which can be completed in shorter time periods. These micro internships are especially helpful to students who may need to drop a course mid-semester because they  can still benefit from project-based learning.  

By re-imagining the traditional internship, Bay Path gives all its students the opportunity to gain practical experience that will improve their job prospects, helps employers fill their talent pipeline, and increases the value of its degrees. “The ultimate ROI that we are providing is career preparation,” Anderson shared, and curriculum embedded, project based experiences do just that.      

Together we can increase the value of internships.

While increasing the supply of traditional internships, growing the number of employer-institution partnerships, and experimenting with new internship structures will go a long way towards addressing the internship supply and demand imbalance, more needs to be done to increase the value of internships.    

Having an internship and listing it on a resume is not enough in today’s competitive environment. BHEF reports that only 38% of employers said internships are an important factor in the hiring process. What employers value most about a candidate’s work history is working in a role that requires people skills (57%), articulating the impact made during a work experience (55%), and completing relevant tasks or projects (54%). 

For students to reap the full value of an internship in their job search, we need to work together to intentionally build these elements into curriculum embedded, project based experiences. For example, employers and institutions could collaborate on learning objectives that include people skills like teamwork and communication and ensure project alignment. Or structured feedback loops with input from supervisors and faculty, as well as opportunities for self-reflection, could help students better articulate the impact of their experience and what they learned from completing projects. And by coordinating and tracking these activities in a central platform easily accessible by all stakeholders, we can help more students translate their internship experiences into career success.   

Here at Riipen, we believe that helping the millions of students who unsuccessfully seek internships find valuable experiential learning opportunities is a vital step towards eliminating underemployment. At the same time, it helps employers fill their pipelines with skilled talent and institutions increase their career placement, application, and enrollment rates. 

Working together to reimagine internships and foster collaboration across the internship ecosystem, we can create an internship system where students, employers, and institutions achieve their goals. 

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By Dr. Mara Woody, Director, Strategic Partnerships, Riipen

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