In a tough year for college internships, these opportunities stand out

Earlier this year, University of West Georgia student Byron Nelson thought he had landed a prized summer internship in Boston with ServiceNow, the fast-growing maker of office-workflow software. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Suddenly, Nelson's on-site internship evaporated, but his summer dreams stayed alive.

Checking his email a few weeks ago, Nelson found a remarkable update from ServiceNow's chief executive, Bill McDermott. All 360 of ServiceNow's prospective interns, including Nelson, would be spending their summers with the company after all. They just would do so from their homes, as part of a big new virtual internship program.

Working out of his parents' house this summer in Chesapeake, Va., isn't quite what Nelson expected. But he's liking the prospect anyway. "My generation is very digital," he points out. "We're used to using all the technology. This is a natural extension of what we do." So, starting May 26, he will be learning how to be an effective part of Service Now's inside sales team, with most of his training and mentoring happening via video calls.

Overall, the harsh realities of "shelter in place" have disrupted the summer-internship cycle for college students as never before. LinkedIn data shows that the daily rate of summer internship job listings has slumped more than 60% since March 1. (A year earlier, there wasn't any seasonal drop in March.)

Meanwhile, swarms of internship offers have been rescinded, as companies confront a sagging economy and the difficulties of training interns when most physical offices are off limits. News organizations such as USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have documented abrupt cutbacks and students' dismay as a career dream collapses.

Even so, while banks, consulting firms, ad agencies and other big providers of summer internships are retrenching, LinkedIn data shows that in a few fields, 2020's supply of available internships has actually increased.

The chemical industry is a standout, with a 65% increase in March's listings of internships. Also in the plus column are mechanical and industrial engineering internships, up 35%, and consumer-products internships, up 12%

Looking at the internship skills or specialties most in demand, the three fields that stand out are engineering, operations and information technology.

At ServiceNow, this year's cohort of 360 interns will be the California company's largest ever, up 25% from the year earlier total. Some 15,000 applications applied to be part of the company's Class of 2020.

A full 70% of this year's interns will join ServiceNow's product and technology organization. Another 15% will work for the office of the chief information officer, and the final 15% -- including West Georgia's Nelson -- will be in non-technical fields such as sales, marketing & communications, human resources, legal and finance.

Can a virtual internship program still provide sufficient coaching, mentoring and person-to-person networking? Such contacts and socialization, after all, can be just as important to interns' overall development as the actual work that gets done. ServiceNow's chief people officer, Pat Wadors, is betting that today's virtual technology -- and her company's employees -- are up to the task.

Interns at ServiceNow will be paired, via video, with mentors beyond their immediate boss. A lot of training and orientation will be done by video calls, too. Even some forms of social mixers and experts' talks will become part of the virtual-internship experience, with technology doing as much as possible to recreate the energy and engagement of in-person events.

It's taken a lot of work for ServiceNow to figure out how to realign the internship experiene to this new world, Wadors says. But when the realities of work-at-home first became clear a few weeks ago, she recalls, "It took me all of 15 minutes to decide that our internship program had to go digital."

(LinkedIn senior data scientist Carl Shan contributed to this article.)