Earn & Learn Toolkit — Paid Internships

Paid internships are short-term work experiences in which participants get firsthand knowledge of and exposure to jobs or career pathways by engaging in hands-on activities as they work to achieve learning objectives under structured supervision.

Typical Paid Intern Profiles

Secondary and postsecondary students
Recent college graduates
Working-age adults
Career switchers
Young people between the ages of 16 to 24 years old who are disconnected from school and work

Consider a paid internship program if you meet these two criteria:

You have a clear short-term business need (or seasonal or otherwise predictable intermittent business needs) for additional staffing on designated projects where trainees like interns could make an impact
You have one or more employees who have the time and expertise to supervise and mentor interns, to ensure that you provide them with quality learning opportunities

The Upsides of Internships

Benefits to Employers

Talent Advantages

Opportunities to Evaluate and Develop Talent
Employers can get to know interns and assess their knowledge, skills, and abilities before making permanent hiring decisions. A 2017 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that 67.1 percent of interns received full-time job offers and 76.4 percent of them accepted those offers

Lower Recruiting and Onboarding Costs
Interns who move into full-time jobs assimilate faster than employees recruited externally. That helps reduce recruiting, hiring, and onboarding expenses, which average $4,683 per new hire, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

Better Retention Rates
Employees hired following internships with a company are more likely to remain with that company than employees who interned elsewhere or not at all. There is also evidence that paid (versus unpaid) internships create positive effects on a company.

Organizational Advantages

Improvements in Diversity and Innovation
Hiring interns can diversify a company’s workforce and fuel creativity and innovation. For example, young digital natives who are embarking on their careers can bring new perspectives and talents, especially in activities related to the adoption and use of technology.

Increased Productivity
Paid interns should take on meaningful work, and that allows permanent employees to be more productive by pursuing new projects or refocusing on core priorities. In addition, overseeing and mentoring interns can help permanent employees build leadership and management skills.

Enhanced Reputations
Interns who are satisfied with their on-the-job experiences will share positive word-of-mouth reviews of their employers, and that can boost a company’s reputation and its brand recognition. It can also lead to increases in applications for future internships.
Benefits to Interns

Exposure to Careers and Industries
Paid interns can gain on-the-job experience that helps them decide whether they want to make a permanent commitment to a particular role or industry.

Experiential Learning
Hands-on work brings concepts to life, and it deepens classroom learning for interns in secondary or postsecondary education programs.

Opportunities to Build Professional Social Capital
The relationships interns establish on the job help them expand their social networks and can lead to future opportunities for career advancement.

Income and Access
The obvious advantage of paid internships vis-à-vis unpaid internships is that they don’t require participants to sacrifice an income in order to learn. And NACE research offers evidence that unpaid internships contribute to racial inequity because they’re only accessible to people who have the means to work for no pay.

“Because they weren't offering any kind of reward (e.g. pay, stipend, travel allowance) outside the experience, I weighed that against other ways to get similar experience and didn't take the internship.”

— A SkillUp Career Builder explaining their decision to decline an unpaid internship that required participants to work on site

Establish an onboarding plan.
Teach interns your organization’s ins and outs and create a structured training plan that helps them build skills quickly so they can begin making meaningful contributions immediately and continue developing new capabilities to prepare them for a possible move to permanent employment.

Assign the interns real job tasks.
Identify activities that interns can successfully carry out on day one. But also expose them to more complex tasks that they can learn over time. You’ll get a better return on the time and other resources you devote to training interns if the interns are doing work related to your core business objectives.

Designate both a manager and a mentor for each intern.
Managers should oversee the interns’ project work, while mentors can offer them advice about achieving career goals, navigating company culture, building relationships, and other things that contribute to success.

Determine metrics of success.
Your metrics could include the rate at which interns convert to full-time employees, the number of interns who recommend that their friends and relatives apply for jobs or internships at your company, or the business goals you achieve with the support of interns.

Create intern cohorts.
Give interns opportunities to learn from one another and share experiences.

Repurpose resources.
The time and effort you put into running an internship will vary based on factors such as the number of interns you hire and whether you partner with another organization to implement the program. One way to ease the process is to use existing materials, programs, and resources. For example, with slight revisions, your regular onboarding processes could work well for interns, and including interns in company social events and other activities will help them feel like they’re part of the team.

Consult federal labor guidelines and your state’s labor regulations to learn the legal distinctions between employees and interns, wage requirements for interns, and academic credit requirements.

Work with partners who can connect your business to prospective interns, provide support at each phase of implementing an internship program, facilitate work-based learning, and offer training related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Here are some ways various partners can help you:

Colleges and universities

can act as hubs that bring together employers and students. You might also consider joining a structured co-op program that offers interns academic credit. (Northeastern University and Drexel University have strong co-op programs).

Because a smaller company like yours may not have predictable talent needs, it may be tempting to create intern roles only on occasions when you need to staff a one-time project. But making a commitment to hiring interns on a regular basis—seasonally, for example—as part of an ongoing program can help ensure that you devote the time and attention necessary to create a high-quality experience for the interns. Once you build out an internship with the key components we discuss above, create a simple, standing page on your website that describes the program. This can help build confidence among prospective interns and partners that your company has the resources to back the program and offers the supports participants need. And once you have an internship infrastructure in place, you will have the flexibility to create additional intern roles as needed—which is helpful when you’re developing talent for a rapidly evolving discipline like IT.

If you offer mentoring, networking, professional development, and other opportunities through which internship participants can build professional social capital, prospective interns will know that they are likely to have a high-quality experience in your program. One way to ensure that interns will have opportunities to connect with experienced professionals in your organization is to find ways to plug them into your company’s existing activities and support structures instead of creating separate programs for interns.

Transparency can go a long way toward building trust in your company’s brand—and in your reputation as an employer. Be sure to offer fair compensation and benefits for internship roles and make sure you convey that information to prospective interns. Also, make an effort to ensure that you and the interns are in agreement about the intern’s roles and responsibilities. That way, you will know what you can expect from interns in terms of time commitment, the skills they bring to the job, and the work they’ll be doing. And for their part the interns will know what they’ll learn, how and how much they’ll be paid, and what benefits they’ll receive.

NeuroFlow

The Business and Its Earn and Learn Model

NeuroFlow, which has about 100 employees, offers a digital platform that streamlines collection of behavioral health information from individuals to identify worsening conditions and ensure that people get the right care.

In partnership with universities and programs such as Code Differently and SkillBridge, the company has implemented a year-round internship program in areas such as software engineering. It also works with Drexel University to offer six-month co-ops, a specific type of paid internship through which participants receive college credit. A believer in the value of earn and learn programs, NeuroFlow also hires paid apprentices through a partnership with LaunchCode. Interns and apprentices cost NeuroFlow about the same amount, so decisions about which to hire are based on how quickly the company needs someone to move into a full-time role.

Keys to Success

NeuroFlow has a rigorous interview process to ensure that internship candidates are ready for the work they will do, and it provides robust supports to the interns it hires. The company also tries to ensure that interns don’t feel like outsiders who are a separate category of employee, calling them associates instead of interns and, where possible, offering them benefits that are similar to the ones permanent employees receive, such as a monthly mental health stipend.

NeuroFlow says buy-in from the teams that host interns is essential. For example, the engineering unit wanted to diversify its talent pipeline and team members were excited to support interns even if it meant taking on additional tasks, such as mentoring. For technology roles, NeuroFlow has had success starting interns at the end of a software development sprint, so they can hear the recap of that phase of work and prepare to start a new sprint.

Outcomes and Impact

NeuroFlow says the biggest impact of its work-based learning programs is that they have helped it diversify its entry-level talent pipeline and its overall workforce. So far, three interns have converted to full-time roles, and the company says they all made the transition seamlessly because they were familiar with their teams and had institutional knowledge.
i2m Solutions

The Business and Its Earn and Learn Model

Managed services provider i2m Solutions offers IT solutions and infrastructure to small and medium-size businesses. It’s a small business itself, with fewer than 20 full-time employees, and it has been hosting interns since 2018, partnering with CareerLink Philadelphia to recruit and train them. Many of the interns i2m has welcomed—those who are new to the labor market and career switchers alike—are looking for a pathway into IT. Interns complete 12 weeks of coursework with CareerLink and then are placed with i2m for six weeks of workplace experience.

Tips for Success

i2m has employed many earn and learn models, including paid internships, Registered Apprenticeships, and on-the-job training, and recommends each for different purposes. The company specifically suggests using earn and learn programs for roles that are hard to fill through public job postings. It also recommends using internship programs as vehicles through which early-career full-time employees can build managerial skills as mentors to and supervisors of interns.

Outcomes and Impact

While acknowledging that not every intern or apprentice will be a long-term fit for the company, i2m says earn and learn programs hold promise as a way to find long-term employees, citing the example of an i2m employee who started as an intern, progressed to being an apprentice, and now is a systems administrator and engineer. The company credits this success in part to the active learning and training the employee received as an intern and an apprentice. One of the things the company considers while seeking interns is the fact that IT can be a path to the middle class for members of populations that have faced barriers to economic advancement.