CRM for Internship Management (1 of 6)
Experience based on real-life practice is worth a zillion times more than knowledge acquired from a book. Therefore, internships where students actually go and practice their future profession in real companies have become an increasingly important component in the curricula of study programs. And although it is also good practice for the later search for a paid job, a lot of vocational education providers see it is their obligation to make sure that there are sufficient internship places available for all students. Also, institutions want to be able to qualify the internship places and be able to weight the experience that students can obtain there. And obviously, they want to protect students for companies that hire interns for the wrong reasons, like having a cheap labor resource, as well. And that is why it is important for educational institutions to remain a party in the dialogue between the internship company and student. And it is also why many institutions want to keep their own database of available and high quality internship places, rather than just to refer all their student to the commercial internship brokers on the web.
CRM systems are a good place to keep track of available internship opportunities. Because, if you think about it, institutions should want to build a long-term relationship with the companies they send their student to, so that the content of the internships (what students can learn) can be tuned to the curriculum (what a student needs to learn). Obviously, internship providers can also give great input for the curriculum as well.
The internship process that can be supported by a CRM system contains of 6 sub-processes:
- Acquiring internship places
- Qualifying internship places
- Matching student to internship places
- Formally placing students in internship places
- Monitoring the progress of the internship
- Evaluating the internship
In the coming days we will post a blog entry for each of these sub-processes. So stay tuned to this blog, and follow if you want to be alerted to future posts
CRM FOR EDUCATION 