By: Deborah Johnson Wood
An innovative web-based toolkit will help West Michigan employers create internship programs, recruit qualified interns and manage the intern once he or she is on board. A survey created by the West Michigan Strategic Alliance sparked the idea for the toolkit.
“We created a survey so we could get a snapshot of what internships were in the region, who had them, who wanted them, and why they didn’t have them,” says Cindy Brown, internship project manager. “We sent the survey to the West Michigan Chamber Coalition and the Association of Human Resource Management of Greater Grand Rapids, and they forwarded it to their members.”
Those members included a diverse group of businesses, including financial services, manufacturing, education, health care, nonprofits and retail.
WMSA plans an early February soft launch for the toolkit and a hard launch in April in conjunction with the launch of the Internship Portal, a statewide push to attract and retain young talent through internships. WMSA handled development of the West Michigan portal, with a goal of attracting 3,000 interns by 2012.
“Students right now don’t feel there are career opportunities around the area,” Brown says. “Once the internship programs begin they’ll see they have these great opportunities available. About 40 percent of student interns will stay with the company if a job offer is made, and that will help us keep the talent in the area once they’ve graduated.”
In return, the employers get excited, enthusiastic workers who bring ideas from the classroom and different ways of looking at things, says Brown.
“It helps employers with recruiting down the road,” she adds. “They’ve got an employee that’s trained and ready to go when they graduate.”
Source: Cindy Brown, West Michigan Strategic Alliance; Tim Penning, Penning Ink Public Relations Consulting
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Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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