Parker Dewey, the pioneer and leading provider of Micro-Internships between college students and companies, is now helping organizations move internship opportunities online as an alternative to canceling their planned summer programs. As a mission-driven organization, Parker Dewey is supporting businesses across all industries, leveraging its expertise in facilitating remote, project-based, paid, professional experiences between companies and college students. By using these best practices developed during the last five years, organizations can ensure continued engagement between college students and managers, despite the impacts of COVID-19.
“There has been worldwide disruption in the workplace, but summer internship programs don’t need to stop. We are happy to work with organizations as they bring these programs online in a way that’s specific to their company’s needs and delivers meaningful value to the students.” said Founder and CEO, Jeffrey Moss. “We’ve found that by ‘unbundling’ the workload of a traditional internship into discrete projects, interns working remotely can have an engaging experience that best prepares them to launch their careers upon graduation. In the same way, managers appreciate the support the interns provide on their projects, and find projects create more authentic opportunities to mentor the college student, all of which can be done remote.”
Parker Dewey aims to help organizations launch remote internship programs by providing resources for managers, interns, and other employees. With thousands of busy professionals and college students engaged in this type of remote work year-round, resources such as project templates matched to job descriptions, custom employee portals, best practices, and other content have been proven to drive positive outcomes, including intern and manager experience, conversion to full-time role, diversity, retention, and other key metrics.
While only five percent of companies have already canceled their summer internships as reported in a recent survey by LDP Connect, there is still a lot of uncertainty as companies are rapidly making decisions. As students and professionals are adapting to remote work, ensuring a valuable internship experience can be critical to organizations looking to hire and rebuild their workforce in the coming months.