Incubating Talent: Tips for Nurturing Youth Skills

At USAID’s Partnerships Incubator, we are tasked with incubating new and nontraditional partners for the Agency. Working with partners at the direction and discretion of USAID headquarters and Missions, we provide training, resources, and support for organizations that have never partnered with USAID to help them learn and grow. Not only do we foster partnerships with organizations, but we also elevate and empower the next generation of international development professionals.?

On this World Youth Skills Day , I wanted to share some of the methods we have developed at the Incubator for finding and nurturing youth talent.

Contribute to Current and Future Success

Our internship program has been largely successful because of our strong partnership with The Washington Center, or TWC. TWC attracts a strong slate of college-level students committed to public service. Time and time again, we have been impressed with the maturity and professionalism of these young people. Once we retain interns, we make it a point to develop meaningful relationships with them, understanding their educational and career goals to help us find opportunities that contribute to their current and future success. These relationships have proven fruitful as we often see our interns return for future intern opportunities or as staff following their graduation.

We have sustained our relationships with past interns. We enjoy seeing them thrive on various paths and remain connected with them to follow their success and professional advancement.?

“I began a summer internship with the Partnerships Incubator that was scheduled to last for just two months,” said Ryan Sheets, a summer 2020 intern. “Over the next two years, I continued to work with the Partnerships Incubator and went from a part-time associate to the group’s full-time Project Assistant. Now as a 2022 USAID Payne Fellow, I look forward to beginning a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins University and a career in USAID’s Foreign Service, knowing that the training and inspiration I received at the Partnerships Incubator were the spark that set off my journey in international development.”

Be Intentional

At the Incubator, we feel strongly that every team member brings unique contributions, regardless of career level. Interns are given a seat at the table alongside the rest of our team. Interns with the Incubator have more opportunities for high-level interactions and engagements than they might at other more-hierarchical organizations, learning concrete skills like project management and meeting facilitation, among others.?

We involve our interns in real work, work that has an actual impact, not simply data entry or filing (those routine tasks that all organizations must accomplish are shared among our staff, too!). “My internship at the Incubator provided me with the knowledge that can be applied to various fields of work. I was able to see all the different aspects of the project, like HR processes, financial reporting, consultant management, market research, and more,” remarked Tori Close, a summer 2021 intern. She has since graduated and joined the Incubator as Finance & Operations Assistant.?

Interns contribute practical, real-world contributions that our interns make is our Collaboration Styles Survey tool. In a previous Kaizen project, we tested and validated the idea that collaboration styles and coachability can favorably influence project implementation, success, and sustainability through the collection of anecdotal evidence. However, we did not have a formal method for capturing information from the various teams receiving acceleration support.?

Give Real-World Business Problems

Interns bring new ideas and perspectives and can help solve workplace “puzzles” if you give them a chance. We want our interns to grow during their experience with the Partnerships Incubator, so we give them real work, not just busy work. We’ve been very pleased with the outputs, and they have been pleased with the actual work experience.??

In the summer of 2021, we tasked an Incubator intern team with the assignment to finalize industry research on collaboration styles and coachability and construct the final Collaboration Styles Survey tool. Our Partner & Agency Readiness Unit now administers the survey in our initial engagement period with new partners and has now used the tool with 16 organizations.

Broaden Horizons

Another hallmark of our team overall is our willingness to support each other across organizational units. We are utility players. Similarly, our interns team up with staff on various types of responsibilities and tasks that pique their interest when they have time, broadening their understanding of the different facets of the project and expanding their knowledge and networks. No Incubator staff member or intern is stovepiped into a narrow focus; instead, they gain exposure to various tasks and units.

“Interning at the Partnerships Incubator gave me a chance to collaborate with all the departments in the organization to build sustainable partnerships between USAID and development organizations. Not only did I help the Finance and Operations team to maintain a budget tracker for the consultants, but I also assisted the Communications team in designing a quiz that improves WorkwithUSAID.org users’ experiences,” said Zhuoer Li, spring 2022 who has gone on to explore the world of finance as a personal wealth management intern with Neuberger Berman.?

At the Incubator, we host regular “brown bag” sessions about international development and professional growth for our interns. These brown bags show interns the multitude of opportunities in the international development field and how to build those more meaningful relationships. We have hosted sessions on “Women in International Development,” “Growth Mindset,” and “Development Storytelling,” among others.

Final Reflections

A great testament to the success of our internship program is the fact that several of the Incubator’s past interns have come back to work with us after their graduation (shout-out to Ryan Sheets and Tori Cose, as well as to Sam Weisman, an intern on my previous Kaizen project, Securing Water for Food, and now an Acceleration Liaison with the Incubator!).

One thing is true: whether we interact with young people as interns or as early-career professionals on our project staff, our entire team invests deeply in those relationships because of the great potential that we see in those young professionals whose paths cross ours.?

The talented young people who have come through the virtual doors of the Incubator have provided me with some of my proudest moments as Project Director. Elevating youth in the workplace brings essential voices and viewpoints to the international development conversation. While we have much to offer them in terms of a fulfilling, exciting, and flexible workplace, we know that their innovative ideas and fresh approaches bring just as much to our work and the results we are able to deliver for USAID.?

Interested in resources that your organization can use to empower youth? Check out the Incubator’s new article on the WorkwithUSAID.org News & Insights blog , which shares three helpful guides from the site’s resource library , as well as a selection of inspiring youth-focused organizations from the Partner Directory .

Project Director Donna Vincent Roa leads USAID’s Partnerships Incubator, a $47M global service hub and project of?Kaizen ,?A Tetra Tech Company ?set up to expand the agency’s capacity for partnerships, diversify and strengthen its partner base, and build the capacity of partners who have received an award from USAID. The Partnerships Incubator’s mission is to help USAID engage new and local partners and catalyze innovations that advance development impact.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of and should not be attributed to USAID or the USG.