trout abby - learning good employee skills maximizing internship program effectiveness - presentation

Learning Good Employee Skills: Maximizing Internship Program Effectiveness NSEE Annual Conference, September 2016 Abby Trout, Career Center Carol Trosset, Institutional Research and Ass

Learning Good Employee Skills:

Maximizing Internship Program

Effectiveness

NSEE Annual Conference, September 2016

Abby Trout, Career Center Carol Trosset, Institutional Research and Assessment

Carleton College

Carleton College = a highly selective liberal arts

college in Minnesota, with 2000 undergraduates.

internship process and its focus on learning goals

which skills are most valued by interns’ employers

become aware of and learn these skills

Career Center mission:

Carleton Career Center learning goals:

Career Tracks

• Career Center provides funding to cover expenses (i.e.,

housing, transportation, food)

• $386K awarded for Summer 2016

• Internships located all over the world (all over US and 29

countries) and in a variety of industries

What makes for a rewarding internship?

• A strong relationship with a supervisor

• Learning

• Goals

• Self-discovery

At Carleton, students specify learning goals:

Research on Learning Outcomes

• What are the actual learning outcomes?

• What are the most important/beneficial outcomes,

that internships should foster?

• How can we assess (a) the degree to which students

achieve these outcomes, and (b) the quality of their performance as interns?

• Can we identify how beneficial learning took place, so

we can design experiences that maximize these effects for other students?

Bennington College Research:

Assessing Internship Performance

Liberal arts college in southwest Vermont

700 undergraduates 7-week internship required every winter All students complete 4 internships

Research in 2013-14 and 2014-15 Holly McCormack, Dean of Field Work Term

What are internships for?

• Students want to explore possible career paths, and to start building a resume that will lead to jobs after college

• Chronicle of Higher Education and NPR’s Marketplace 2012

study “The Role of Higher Education in Career Development:

Employer Perceptions” found that

– Employers place more weight on experience, particularly internships and employment during school vs academic credentials including GPA and college major when evaluating a recent graduate for employment – Among all industry segments, an internship is the single most

important credential for recent college graduates to have on their resume.

– 60% of employers practice intern-to-permanent hiring.

Liberal Arts Learning vs Job Training

• AACU 2013 study “It Takes More than a Major: Employer

Priorities for College Learning and Student Success” found

that employers endorsed a blended model of liberal and

applied learning—practices that involve students in active, effortful work.

• Bennington Field Work Term’s goal: Students will apply their academic learning in a broader context outside the classroom.

• Same AACU study asked employers whether they want

employees to have the skills liberal arts colleges already

value, like writing and critical thinking Employers said “yes.”

But what do interns need to learn?

Supervisors of Bennington students wrote open-ended

evaluations, listing interns’ strengths and areas needing

improvement.

What did they write about without being prompted?

• “She was always on time and willing to step in and help with anything.”

• “He asked great questions and responded to feedback gracefully.”

• “She could pay more attention to her body language during meetings and while working At times she seemed a bit distracted and disinterested.”

• “He tended to drift off task to check Facebook.”

Categories employers mentioned:

• Critical thinking skills

• Other job skills

Note: Most of these are neither liberal arts skills nor job-specific skills

Instead, they are qualities of any good employee in any job sector.

Qualities of a good student?

(taken from Bennington Faculty narrative evaluations)

• Work ethic – “works hard,” “diligent,” “spends time texting during class”

• Engagement – “excellent work when focused but not consistently engaged”

• Quality – “does high quality work,” “should focus on producing high-quality work the first time around”

• Organization – “sometimes unprepared,” “talented but disorganized”

• Punctuality – “late to class several times,” “some absences”

• Takes direction – “responded to feedback,” “needs to learn to follow directions”

• Teamwork – “listens and contributes well in discussion,” “good team member”

• Initiative – “challenges himself,” “does the minimum to get by”

• Learns quickly – “learns from mistakes,” “learns quickly”

• Confidence – “should have more confidence,” “wish would speak up more”

Evaluating internship performance

Mostly works hard, but some tendency to lose focus and drift off

task

Productive and conscientious

Works harder than others and is much more productive

Engagement

with the work

Seems unmotivated, avoids or resists unwanted tasks

Engagement and motivation vary with the task

Engaged in the work, willing to help as needed

Seizes every opportunity to learn as much as possible Organization

and Efficiency

Inefficient, forgets about assignments, may not follow through to completion

Still learning how

to manage time and priorities when working alone

Good time management, follows up on assigned tasks

Unusually efficient, intuitive sense of priorities

Takes direction Fails to incorporate

feedback into work

Some tendency to put own agenda

Checks in regularly,

Frequently seeks out feedback and

Benefits of the rubric:

• All employers are asked to comment on a consistent group of skills

• Students have a consistent definition of what the College means by

Challenges for using rubrics with employers:

• Colleges need to compare the students in aggregate, and over time.

• But students all have different jobs and employers.

• The students start at different stages of development.

• The employers have different expectations.

• We cannot norm the employers to consistent standards.

• The evaluation process cannot be blind or unbiased.

Carleton College Research:

Employee Skills Metacognition

Focus was on tracking and increasing student

awareness of these skills.

90 of the funded interns in Summer 2016 allowed

us to use their materials for this research.

Materials included:

Application essays Blog posts Learning contracts Reflective essays Rachel Leatham, Program Director

Student Motives and Preparation

Students’ Learning Goals

• Explore a possible career – 73%

• Gain academic learning – 47%

• Learn job-specific skills – 41%

• Improve research skills – 22%

• Improve communication skills – 13%

• Improve time management skills – 13%

• Improve foreign language skills – 12%

• Gain cross-cultural competency – 11%

• Improve interpersonal interaction skills – 11%

• Gain life skills – 7%

32% had only job-specific or academic goals.

Learning Outcomes from Final Reflections

Quality of work 0 9 Interpersonal skills 1 7

Time management 12 10 Initiative 0 4

Professionalism 3 3 Communication skills 12 13

What They Learned about Employee Skills

Work Ethic

• The importance of persistence

• How much work is required to develop a good product

• How to time breaks to be more productive

Engagement

• That feeling engaged with one’s work improves its quality

• That personal growth happens when you commit yourself to something

What They Learned, cont.

• Improved time management skills

• Became better organized

• The importance of managing one’s time

What They Learned, cont.

Flexibility

• The importance of flexibility

• The value of patience

• That being flexible can improve the quality of the work

Taking Direction

• The importance of asking questions

• The importance of taking notes

• How to accept critique

What They Learned, cont.

Teamwork

• The importance of teamwork

• The importance of learning from co-workers

• Teamwork and facilitation skills

• Project management and leadership experience

Interpersonal Skills

• The value of interacting and building relationships with co-workers

Those with a goal more likely to learn;

Most who learned did not have that goal.

What leads to the learning when it’s

not motivated by a goal?

• “Staying organized was something that I struggled with sometimes My supervisor would send me an e-mail of something that would be coming up in two weeks and because it was two weeks away I’d say, ‘Well, I’ll read it next week when I have more time.’ I would then lose my e-mail in my constantly overflowing inbox and I’d have to ask my supervisor to resend it Early on, at meetings I wouldn’t take notes, thinking my memory would be good enough, but when it became clear that the little nuances and wordings mattered just as much as the main idea we were

Events, cont.

• “My supervisor was an extremely busy woman – as a result she usually sent tasks

to me and my two fellow interns and left it up to us to work together or divvy up the work as we thought best This was an important exercise in teamwork: I

learned the importance of giving credit where credit was due was essential for a successful team Even small things like saying ‘Ashley and I edited this report’

rather than ‘here’s the report you wanted edited’ goes a long way in creating a healthy group dynamic.”

• “I’ve learned to keep my collected data clean Although this project had been going on for three years now, there was no standardized manner of storing or analyzing the data Thus, the last two weeks of my internship were largely spent going through thousands of haphazardly sorted photos, essentially doing other interns’ work for a second time This was incredibly frustrating Acknowledging that I have been lax in storing my data neatly during past projects, I learned the hard way that it pays to stay organized from the beginning!”

Difference between a job and a class

• “Through this project I developed my willingness to pay attention to detail as I encountered many specific comments of constructive criticism, a type of

conversation I rarely have in an academic setting as little of my work ever reaches beyond my professor grading a specific assignment This experience helped me understand the kind of work put into public education initiatives and the

importance of detail-oriented review.”

• “Usually I was very engaged in my work because I had to be extremely attentive when processing information and working on my projects In the field that I am interning for, mistakes must be recognized and fixed before it is sent in.”

• “Here, giving up means letting over 40 children down Giving up means sending the message to those children that they aren’t worth it Giving up meant

impacting someone else’s life just as much as my own In school, giving up in a class, for example, only really affects me I guess in other words I learned a greater sense of responsibility, because I have wanted to just quit so many times.”

Directed Reflection via Weekly Blog Prompts

• Observe others’ work ethic

• How you stay engaged with the work

• What you’ve learned by making a mistake

• Standards of punctuality

• Observed nature of professional conduct

• Difference between a supervisor and a professor

• How people work in teams

• Relevance of interpersonal skills

• Working independently and taking initiative

• Accomplishments and skill building

Among those who reflected on learning

non-goal employee skills, 3/4 wrote about employee skills in response to summer blog prompts.

• “The skill that I’m most proud of is my growing sense of flexibility I tend to be a rather stubborn person, and I don’t like to change things or let on when I am lost This internship, however, has really challenged me to have to change this Every time I think that I am finally done with creating my stimuli, my supervisor thinks of something I can change My original plans and expectations for my experiments have certainly changed a lot over the course of the past five weeks, and I think

that’s absolutely awesome Though it’s certainly frustrating to feel as if I’m not

making progress at times, it’s really cool seeing just how much of a process

experiment design is.”

• “Even doing boring tasks (sharpening pencils, printing tickets, folding programs), I

am surrounded by friendly and engaging people Many of my bosses are on teams that put on shows here, so seeing their shows serves as motivation and a reminder that grunt work is almost always necessary.”

Differential Salience

management and communication skills.

questions, attention to detail, and relationships with co-workers.

professionalism (other than dress code).

– Require one of the three learning goals to be a generalizable skill.

– Continue to adjust blog prompts to include features of employee skills we know students are encountering, and that they should think about.

– Find ways to expand their awareness of the less salient skills (like professionalism).

– Use metrics to show incentive to other interns to register with our office

Next Steps

• Broader application of specific findings and the usage of

structured reflection pre-, during, and post-experience to

other preparation programs

– Post-grad fellows – On-campus jobs and interns – Externships

• Structure alumni-student programming

– Build alumni profile questions around employee skills prompts – 30 Minutes program questions

Questions?