Nearsoft Academy: Lessons learned after almost a decade preparing interns

With a tight talent market, developing talent in-house gets a special appeal. Not only because of the reduction of costs but for the opportunity to rise the bar for future generations. Some assumptions anybody makes when trying to implement an internship program are,

• We can ask our seniors to mentor interns
• We are better at teaching than their university professors
• With the right training program any college graduate can produce good work at our organization

After almost a decade of working with interns, at Nearsoft academy We learned a lot of hard lessons that help us to get rid of those assumptions

1. Selection is Key

There are no training program that could prepare anybody, so you need to establish a good selection process that help you to find good candidates for your organization. It does not matter if you are improving or implementing a recruitment process, reWork is a good resource that with great guides to

• Train your interviewers
• Shape the candidate experience
• Use structured interviewing

2. Be a gardener, not a carpenter

Nobody can shape a person to meet the organization needs but anybody can engineer the right environment and practices so people can growth to meet any organization expectations.
Your environment design and practices should be more aligned to your organization values than to the specific technical skills.

For example to foster our Nearsoft value Teamwork one of the phases consists on asking them to complete a project where We , kind of secretly , know there is a big chance of failure even if they work together. After giving the assignment and provide them some resources( like budget,references, contacts) the staff steps back and hopes the best

We also observe the social dynamics at play, specially right before deadlines. Sometimes we made small interventions like indirectly asking them for things we know the are ignoring, hoping they make the corrections by themselves. Usually all our intern batches face failure in this phase, so we use the opportunity to help them to learn from the experience and show the scar with pride.

3. Discipline equals freedom

I can not express it better than Jocko’s words

While Discipline and Freedom seem like they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, they are actually very connected. Freedom is what everyone wants — to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline. If you want financial freedom, you have to have financial discipline. If you want more free time, you have to follow a more disciplined time management system. You also have to have the discipline to say “No” to things that eat up your time with no payback—things like random YouTube videos, click-bait on the internet, and even events that you agree to attend when you know you won’t want to be there. Discipline equals freedom applies to every aspect of life: if you want more freedom, get more discipline.

4. Mentorship is earned

The intern should earn its mentor, and the mentor should earn its intern, mentorship it is a two way street.

5. Be prepared to clean their mess

They are going to make mistakes, you need to be there as janitor and safety net, so the mistake does not convert into something catastrophic. Be ready to use the cleaning as a learning opportunity.

6. Help them to outgrow your organization

Lifetime employment has become antiquated, it was never realist. People growth, sometimes faster than the organization does. So from the get go, you need to consider something like Tours of Duty from Reid Hoffman’s The Allience book. The book suggest that in order to cultivate trust employers need to think of employees as allies:

Think of employment as an alliance: a mutually beneficial deal, with explicit terms, between independent players. The employment alliance provides the framework managers and employees need for the trust and investment to build powerful businesses and careers