When I worked at smaller companies, we never had an internship program. It wasn’t until I came to Walters & Wolf that I got to see what an internship was. In the beginning, it was really just the company’s way of bringing in college students to see what we do. The program wasn’t very intentional. What people would work on, what types of things they would learn and how they would learn them would vary between interns and year to year.
Starting a few years ago, we decided to really tune up our internship process. I thought it would be great to write about it because I really love what we have developed and what we have accomplished so far with this program. If your company does not yet hire interns or if the do hire interns but your program could use some tweaking, then hopefully some of these ideas will help.
The goals of the internship at Walters & Wolf are several:
- Teach people about our industry. Most people are not familiar with the glazing industry so this helps them see what our business is all about.
- Give them something for their resume. They are going to graduate and need to go out and find a job. A good internship should give them experience and accomplishments that will fill out their resume when they graduate.
- Teach them about our company. We are unique. They will undoubtedly work at other companies but we want them to see our culture and our excitement.
- Grow their personal and professional network. They will meet lots of people at our company and make new friends and connections.
- Maybe come to work for us! If they love our company and we love them, there could be a fit. We are always looking for great people.
So to begin with, we started with who we wanted to hire. If we were going to hire interns, why not hire the best we could find. So the first thing we had to do was decide what an intern recruiting and interview process was going to look like.
For recruiting, we decided to start with the colleges that we felt would have the best applicants for our industry. At first we started in Chico because they have a large construction management program. But we soon decided to start recruiting from some of the great schools in the Bay Area also. Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara, San Jose State all have great people who might fit into our organization. So we have a booth that we bring to the career fairs, put ads on all the bulletin boards and see how many resumes we can get.
In a previous post, I wrote about our interview process. We had used our recruiting efforts as an easy way to tune up our interviewing skills. We developed a set of behavioral questions that help us see who would be the best fit. Entry level interviews are hard because you can’t ask questions about previous work experience in your field. So most of our questions have to do with how they would fit in with our organization. Look at my previous post for examples.
So after screening the resumes we conduct our interviews and when that is complete we pick our top candidates. Some years we will have one student, some years we will have 2 or more. It just depends on who we find. My suggestion is to get good at one then work toward more if you feel you can handle it effectively.
When it is the student’s first year with us, we follow the following program:
2 weeks in sales. This is where things start in our company so this is where they start. They learn how an estimate is created, they attend some of the design meetings, they will create some takeoffs and learn the process that our sales department goes through to land projects.
2 weeks in operations. We will have them run through the same training program we give all new project managers. They learn how to read plans, create RFI’s and submittals, price change orders and see how all of our processes work.
2 weeks in the shop. The spend one week in Shop A fabricating stick wall and one week in Shop B fabricating Unit wall.
2 weeks in the field. They will spend time going to different job sites and doing some actual installations.
After 8 weeks, they have a pretty good overview of what our company does and how each of the departments function. At this point, they are ready to start their project. We create a list of projects for them to choose from. They can find something that peaks their interest and will help our company.
So this is the interesting part about internships. We are all busy. There is never enough time to tackle all the things that we should be doing. It is hard enough to stay in front of the curve with the work you have going let alone take on more projects. But here you have this young, bright, excited person who is willing to work at your company for 10 weeks or so during the summer. No, they don’t know what you do. No, they can’t run a project or sell a job. But they can move your company forward on things you just don’t have the bandwidth to tackle. In the process, they will learn, gain an accomplishment bullet for their resume and you can have something you didn’t have 10 weeks before.
So, what types of things? Here is a short list of things we’ve had our interns working on in the last couple of years:
- Making our legacy data digital. Creating a searchable database of older projects and their shop drawings.
- Going paperless. What does it cost us currently to print all of our drawings? What tools are available to move into the digital age?
- Using Autodesk Inventor. We had heard this was a great tool for a number of things. We did not have any internal expertise. So, we had an intern learn the program, create some models, find the best practices and see how it might fit into our engineering process.
- Experiment with modeling. BIM models of curtain walls are big. When we model in Autocad they get hard to manage. What methods could we use to mitigate this issue? If you build a model in different platforms, how does it perform?
- Create a submittal module. On every project we need to submit product data. Could we build a central repository for all of this information and make the submittal process easy? Something that everyone could update to keep it current so you don’t have to go find the data every time you start a new project.
- Create a warranty module. Same idea. We submit standard warranty data all the time. Create a central repository for this information so the PM just has to select what they want and they get the most current warranty information, maintenance instructions, etc…
- Create standard engineering data. We have taught our interns how to use Autocad and then had them build standard details, fabrication tickets, fabrication data, etc… for our systems.
- Advanced energy modeling. What software is available. How do we use it?
These are just some of the projects we have worked on in the last couple of summers.
The amazing thing about today’s youth is that they don’t think there is anything they can’t do. They live in an age where anytime someone thinks of something they want, they just write an app to do it. So we just give them the information and let them try to figure it out. They have time, youth and the internet on their side. A little instruction each day to keep things on track and they can come up with some pretty amazing solutions that would take your other employees years to do.
I’m posting this today because it is the last day for our intern program for this summer. I really look forward to our summers and the interns we get to work with and we had 3 great people this year who really helped to move our company forward on a bunch of fronts. I’d like to thank Eunice, James and Ryan for all their work this summer. Creating a great intern program can be rewarding to you and the students you hire. Hopefully this article will inspire you to give it a try!
