Tag Archives: digitalKnowledge
Keeping the Communication Lines Open After the Internship
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
Once your company’s internship ends, it’s important to make sure the communication does not end with it. Hopefully at the end of an internship, both a company and its intern are parting ways with a positive experience to look back on. And if everything goes as planned, both that company and the intern will want to work together in the future.
Most interns still have one, maybe even two or three, years of school left before entering the “real world.” So a company can go from communicating with their intern on a daily basis to not speaking to them for a year. But, a lot of things can happen in that last year of school – your intern may attend career fairs, have job interviews, and meet potential employers. How are you going to continue to stick …
The Benefits of using Partnerships to Grow Your Internship
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
As you may recall in my earlier blog entries, digitalKnowledge chose to team up with the Interns for Indiana Program through Purdue University for their first internship. We chose to go this route for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, with this being our first internship in company history we could use the help. Interns for Indiana has supported our internship from the beginning, including sending us resumes of students who fit our criteria and setting up an “interview fair” for us to meet these candidates. Secondly, Interns for Indiana offers funding for smaller start-up companies.
Choosing to partner with Interns for Indiana has without a doubt been one of the best decisions we could have made. Not only do they offer administrative support to employers, but they also provide the interns with additional educational opportunities. Bart has had …
The Benefits of Hiring an Intern (And how to avoid training candidates for your competitors)
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
digitalKnowledge strives to hire recent college graduates for their fresh perspectives and eagerness to continue learning. Our company tries to hire 2-3 Associate Consultants each year. A lot of on-campus recruiting occurs through career fairs, class presentations, and on-campus interviews. We hire talented, entrepreneurial graduates, but they come into our company with little to no real knowledge of our business.
Bart, our intern, has been with us for two months now, and while that may seem like a short amount of time, he is “one of us.” He knows about digitalKnowledge, our values, our processes – formal and informal, and he is part of our culture and environment. Through his time with us, he has sat in on client meetings, conference calls, and staff meetings. Not to mention, he sits next to three of our developers each day and has …
Half-way there: Ensuring Your Intern has the Best Experience Possible
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
I can’t believe that Bart’s internship is at the halfway mark. While he has plenty of work to show for his time with us, time really has flown by. I was sitting at my desk a week or two ago and realized that with the halfway point approaching, our mid-internship evaluation would be soon. I created an evaluation form prior to the start of the internship, but I wanted to make sure that the evaluation process was not just about filling out a form and filing it away – I wanted to use this experience to make sure that Bart’s second half of the internship was even better than the first.
I want to take the time to fully prepare for the evaluation with Bart and make sure that he is getting the most value from his time with us. …
The Art of Consulting
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
This past week, Bart had the opportunity to not only take part in a client meeting but to also do some traveling with our Co-Founder and Vice President, Sean. With digitalKnowledge being a consulting firm, we made the decision early on that it was imperative that we expose our intern to the client side, not just the internal works. Bart traveled to a small town in Ohio and had the opportunity to observe, meet a variety of people, and get a taste of the art of consulting.
Bart shared his experience…
“Recently I was given the opportunity to attend my first client meeting! When I was approached I wasn’t sure where I would be heading, or what digitalKnowledge was doing for the client. I was excited for a few reasons. I was given the chance to see what consulting does …
Avoiding Intern Isolation
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
Several things can lend to a negative experience for an intern – in my opinion, one of the biggest pitfalls can be isolating your intern from the rest of the company. One of the intern’s expectations is to dive deeper into your company and the industry – to get an insider’s look at how your company operates. Companies who treat their interns like temporary employees who come in and work on tasks that quite frankly, no one else wants to do, are neglecting their interns of valuable experiences.
There are several ways that we have chosen to involve Bart in the company and allow him to feel like he is a true member of the dK team. The first being very simple, but important – his location in the office. A lot of the work that Bart is participating in …
What if we CAN have a successful internship program?
Entry by Ashley Cashen, Talent Acquisition and Retention Coordinator, digitalKnowledge
Founded in 2003, digitalKnowledge is a smaller, but mighty IT consulting firm. Last fall it became very apparent that digitalKnowledge was missing out on a great opportunity – hosting an intern. When the idea first began circling the office, it made perfect sense. We are a smaller company, but that lends to our unique office culture – a culture that is a perfect educational environment for an undergrad intern.
Several months later, here we are, with the first dK internship program well under way. The process to get here consisted of a lot of research and conversations pondering that never-ending question, what if? What if we don’t have enough work to keep the intern busy? What if we can’t pay the intern enough? What if we don’t have the staff to oversee the intern? And so on, and so on.
…