CRM for Internship Management (3 of 6): Qualification Of Intership Places
Internships provide the opportunity to students to gain valuable experience in a working environment, and therefore many educational institutions consider it their responsibility to make sure that there is a sufficient supply of internships available to their students. However, depending on the economic situation in a country or region there might be too much supply of internship places for certain career fields (like technology or economic studies), while for other career fields (e.g. healthcare) there might be a shortage. In both situations the establishment of long term relationships between internship providing companies and institutions of higher education is critical. These relationships will make the internship providers loyal to the university or school and they will prevent that the relevancy and aptitude of the internship places providing companies need to be contemplated time after time again.
For the qualification of the supply of internship places the following questions are relevant:
- Which competencies and/or knowledge can be acquired during the internship?
- Is there a match between what a student can learn during the internship and what he should learn to complete his study curriculum?
- Does the company have the capacity and the know-how to guide and coach the intern student?
- Are there any negative reasons not to place students with this company (negative experiences in the past, bad reputation, the suspicion that the company in fact is not looking for an intern, but just for a very affordable employee…)?
- Is the company willing to establish a long term relationship with your institution?
CRM systems are a good place to store information relevant to the qualification process. The to be acquired competencies can be registered per company and/or per internship place. The coaches and guides can be registered per company and per intern placement and the official accreditations can be recorded in the system as well. Self-service access can be provided through a portal, so as to allow the companies to update their own profile information. Also a blacklist, containing companies that in the past proved not to be capable of guiding students during their internship, can also be recorded in the CRM system. Obviously, all the information stored in the CRM system can be used at the next step of the internship management process: matching students to available internship places. This step will be covered in the next episode of this blog.
