Over the course of my career, I’ve had the chance to mentor interns in several different roles. I’ve also had full-time employees reporting to me, but I feel the role of mentoring interns is a bit different, so today I want to dive into the lessons I’ve learned and the best ways I found to make their internships productive for both of us. In Singapore, it is common for university students to have multiple internships of 3-6 months before they graduate, so it can be a great way to supplement your team while you are in the growth phase. Longer internships are definitely better, but if you follow these lessons, you can feel great even about shorter time frames.
Utilize their strengths
Although interns don’t come in with much work experience, they do have transferrable skills from school that you can put to use on day one. I’ve found that research and writing projects are especially good to start with because not only will the intern be able to learn about your industry and solution at the same time as doing the work, it is also an easy kind of project to monitor and provide feedback on. I’ve had all of my interns research and write blog posts as some of their first tasks, and eventually, they even came up with topics I hadn’t thought of before. Competitor research was another area that I had interns work on, and since something like a battlecard has a fixed format, it is easy for them to replicate.
Let them try a variety of projects
I’ve heard from my interns that in some experiences, they get tasked with doing the same thing, like data entry for the whole internship. That’s not an ideal situation for anyone. First of all, if they are bored and feel under-utilized, they won’t be motivated to do good work. Secondly, you should be fair to your interns and give them a chance to learn new skills while they work with you, not just pass off work that no one else wants to do. Thirdly, as interns are new to the working world, neither of you knows what their strengths are or what they might excel at. I had one intern who I started having edit videos, and even though she had never done it before, ended up doing an amazing job.
Leverage their new perspectives
Interns come in with fresh eyes and a different outlook than other employees. If you play your cards right, you can translate that into new ideas and ways of doing things that break the mold of what you’ve already been doing. Since it will likely be the first time they are doing a lot of tasks, they can come up with out-of-the-box ideas that we have blinders to, just because “it’s always been done that way”. In one of my roles, we had a lot of customer queries coming in, we had a system in place to rotate the responses, and it worked well enough, so we hadn’t bothered to improve it. After a few weeks on the job, a new intern came to me with an idea to streamline the process and make everything more trackable, after working out a few kinks with her, we gave it a shot and it worked great.
Provide guidance, not instructions
When you’re experienced at doing something, it is hard not to tell someone you are mentoring exactly what to do step-by-step. But doing that isn’t going to get you the best results, and it isn’t good for your intern’s development either. It is much better to provide the goal, the parameters of what you need the outcome to be, some suggestions on how to get started, and then let them go to work. Check in regularly to answer questions and provide feedback if needed, but don’t micro-manage, let them figure things out on their own. During the pandemic I had an intern who I tasked with creating paid ad campaign reports, I showed her an example of what I had been using, let her spend some time on training resources, and told her how I was using the reports, and sent her off. Within a few iterations, she had more comprehensive and readable reports than before, and we were able to make some critical decisions based on what they showed.
Create opportunities to work with different teams
I view an internship as a two-way street, you are getting the benefit of an extra pair of hands without the cost of another headcount, and they are getting experience and exposure in a role they wouldn’t qualify for full-time. I feel I owe them the opportunity to see different parts of the business and learn how other teams work, not just keep them stuck in a marketing bubble. This will help them later on in their career and may even change their career path. In marketing there are always good opportunities to collaborate with sales, business development, product, and customer teams. By having interns involved in projects with some of these teams they will not only be able to better understand how marketing impacts the business, they will also see what other functions they might be interested in, and give those teams fresh perspectives as well!
So these are the best lessons I’ve learned about making marketing internships most beneficial for both sides. I hope you learned something and have success with your future interns!