A Short Overview of a Big Internship
Infobip received an award for best internship program in the category of big companies in Croatia, for the year 2019.
I found myself thinking about the path of our internship program and surprised myself when I remembered what our program looked like only 2 years prior. I realized the story of our internship is a wonderful story about agility, the power of positive attitude and for me, personal and professional growth.
Infobip has a long tradition of “dev campuses” as we called them, and they have brought interns who grew into some of the best engineers and leaders, still working with us today. For years, our Dev Campus was a great success. By 2016 when I joined the company, the IT industry changed quite a bit, and it was time for something new. I got the info – the model isn’t working anymore. The process became hard on recruiters, the results far from what we were striving for. Students weren’t as interested, and internal stakeholder were skeptic.
In 2017. we took on two (2) interns in Engineering. I’m happy to say both are still in the company so we can brag with a 100% success rate.
Superb statistics aside, we wanted more.
The first thing we did was figure out why our old model wasn’t working anymore. We analyzed what our target group, IT students, were saying, and we listened to what our Engineers who needed to mentor and work with them were saying. As these things often go – they were saying the same thing with different words - students need and want to be taught more.
In spring of 2018 one People Operations professional and one Senior Engineer Team Lead, engaged one University to try again. This is just for the sake of dramatics, we had very active supporters along the way.
We had a group of nine students who ended up being our proof of concept for a 2,5 month long program consisting of two parts after which the students could start working as full fledged members of our Engineering teams.
By the end of the program we realized we had hit the jackpot, and a Net Promoter Score of 92 would confirm that.
By the end of the year we were not the only internship in Infobip targeting IT students so the next step was obvious – let's bring them together. Let’s involve a third department as well. Let’s hold several internships per year. Let’s include more universities and more offices.
After finding a model that worked for both students and internal stakeholders, addressing their needs and wants, scaling was a matter of logistics. 2019 was the year Infobip Internship brought in over 10 times the number of interns than the year before. Internally, it became a collaboration of 5+ departments.
There are plenty lessons to be learned. One of my personal favorites was a meeting with a colleague from Marketing where I learned that a unique selling proposition is a lot more than listing features, and that indeed, a whole is greater than its sum of parts. But the more general would be:
- Don’t be afraid to let go of something, no matter how well it worked before. Honor the tradition and lessons learned and move on.
- Don’t be afraid to pause and regroup.
- Don’t be afraid to start small. If you have quality, quantity will follow.
- Don’t be afraid to start without an army of supporters. Find a few dedicated allies, the results will speak to a wider audience.
- And one thing you absolutely must do: listen to the people you are doing it for.