How We Saved Our Internship Program from the Covid-19 Cancellations
Interns are a quintessential aspect of Aptitive and our mission to recruit and grow an elite team of technical consultants. When looking for interns, we are looking for top caliber students. Our ideal candidates are not only passionate about data & analytics, but are invested in continually expanding their skill set within our 10 week internship program.
Throughout Aptitive’s internship program, our interns work closely with our experienced data, analytics, and data science consultants to help complete real project deliverables for our clients. Monday through Thursday, interns are on-site at clients with the rest of their project teams. On Fridays they come to our office to collaborate, train, and connect with the rest of the team. Internships are not only a way for these students to grow, but it’s a way for us to see how they will fit into our organization. At the end of the program, interns that have proven to have the aptitude, passion, and drive that it takes to become an Aptitive consultant, are offered a full time position upon graduation.
At the beginning of 2020, we hired three interns, Aidan, Charlotte, and Daniel and were prepared to start them at the beginning of June. We even held a happy hour in March to welcome them to our team and get to know them before they started. However, like many organizations, once we realized the shutdown due to Covid-19 would last throughout the summer, our team struggled with what to do. We knew that a fully remote internship would not give the interns the experience they were looking for and would be an additional challenge for our managers as they continue to adjust to this new working environment. We debated the options — “Do we keep the interns on for the summer and hope they have a good experience in a fully remote environment?” “Do we let them go completely and wish them the best?” “Is there a middle ground?”
After a deep dive into our options with the Aptitive leadership team, we found a creative solution that enabled us to give these incredible college students a taste of the life of a data consultant without the challenges of a fully remote 10-week internship. Our solution was to host a condensed 2-week intensive intern “bootcamp” to be held in the middle of the summer.
The goal of this two week bootcamp was to give the interns a well rounded picture and experience of Aptitive; from the technical consulting side, to the marketing and business development side. We achieved this by incorporating technical workshops, internal meetings to learn about the different aspects of the business, hands on work at our current clients, and an internal dashboarding project for our sales and marketing team.
At the end of the intern’s bootcamp, we had them present their experience and tell us what they enjoyed and learned during their time at Aptitive. Here is a snapshot of our interns and what they had to say:
Not only did we get positive feedback from the interns on their experience, but our team was blown away with everything they accomplished in the 2 week period. When Aidan, Charlotte, and Daniel were not in training or working on projects, they collaborated with our internal sales and marketing teams to build a dashboard to support their data needs. The interns were able to build a process to pull data from our CRM and time tracking systems into a Snowflake database. Furthermore they used Tableau to help better visualize key metrics and automate reporting for the sales and marketing team.
While we’re disappointed that we were not able to give our 2020 interns the full Aptitive internship experience, we’re excited that the bootcamp was a success. Jason Maas, Aptitive’s Chief Operating Officer had this to say about our summer 2020 interns, “Our time with the interns was brief, but we saw enough to know they had what it takes to be an Aptitive consultant. Beyond being hard working, inquisitive, and extremely intelligent, Aidan, Charlotte, and Daniel were amazing to work with and did a wonderful job”. As a result, all three interns were extended offers to join our team in the summer of 2021.
No one could have predicted that Covid-19 would rock global economies and cause many organizations to cancel their internship programs. Aptitive was able to adjust our plan and provide an enjoyable experience to our interns. Overall, our internship program, which turned into a condensed two week bootcamp, was extremely successful. We are very proud of our team and interns for another successful internship program at Aptitive.
Originally published at https://aptitive.com on August 17, 2020.
