Deeper Broader Build Key School Partnerships While Reaching New Campuses

Hello, my name is Jasmine Woodard with NACE and I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar, Deeper and Broader: Build Key School Partnerships while reaching new campuses. We encourage you to actively participate in the chat and please post your questions in the Q&A. It is my pleasure to introduce Kristen Shrader, vice president of partnerships with Parker Dwey. Take it away, Kristen. Thank you so much, Jasmine. Really appreciate everybody spending bit of your Friday with me and for your interest in today's conversation. also everyone who says who has said hello in the chat, really love seeing where everybody is from and how geographically dispersed we are. by way of introduction, am going to probably win the award for furthest away. am currently just outside of Bangkok, Thailand. my husband's active duty in the military and so move where Uncle Sam sends us and currently it's literally on the other side of the world. So wanted to share that with you for two reasons. First of all because if happen to say something about it being evening that's because it is where am. It's 11 o'clock at night. So apologize in advance if get some sort of weird timing things that are you know just seem little out of place. but the other reason wanted to share that with you is because asked to do today's session from the the rest of the team because it's just really love what we're going to be talking about. Part of the reason why joined the Parker Dwey team sixish years ago now is because I'm very passionate about how do we come up with ways to help students and employers connect more effectively? How do we help students launch their careers as the best way they possibly can? How do we help employers find out the best talent? And if you work at school, you're supporting both stakeholders. So, how do you do that as effectively as possible? And particularly for today's conversation, let's talk about scale because there's always challenges with trying to grow successful programs. And so I'm very excited to be able to share with you some of the things that we've learned in the past 10 years here at Parker Dwey of how we've seen these partnerships scale as effectively as possible. Now if you take one thing from today's conversation is that for relationships to work well, they need to be collaborative between schools and employers. And the best strategies are when these relationships, these programs are focused on all three of the stakeholders, students, employers, and schools. And when everybody's working together, that's where we really see both effectiveness and scale. And that's why I'm particularly excited to see today's registration list that includes so many members from schools and employers and really is truly representative of the NACE membership community. So again, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. And so just to give you bit of road map of where we're headed for today's conversation and first of all, let me there we go. want to start with you know why is scaling so difficult? I'm sure the fact that you registered you probably have few ideas but just share with you what we hear from our two major constituents, schools and employers. Then want to share with you what we've learned about how to scale, some of the different approaches that we've seen, some of the different characteristics that we've seen that have worked particularly well. But then we're going to dig into some case studies. What have companies and some of our partners, which in this case is schools or some cases nonprofit organizations, what have they done to implement programs that start off small and have scaled successfully? And then what I'm perhaps most excited to share with you for today's conversation is playbook that our team has put together so that you don't just walk away with hopefully some ideas that maybe you can continue and have. You have guide, toolkit, workbook if you will, that you can immediately start to implement to bring this to your organization and in your your your company. So without any further ado, let's go ahead and just kind of share with you what we're seeing. What and why are are scaling these so challenging? Well, when it comes to scale, you know, obviously anytime you're trying to do anything deeper, it's going to require more resources, logistics, coordination, obviously everything that is done is very hetheavy in me in in most cases. So, how do you scale up these events and do so in way that is going to help you reach candidates that have the quality that you're looking for that is going to answer the questions from senior leadership about is this truly an effective ROI and use of resources because as we've all seen resources are are non infinite and so budget manpower there's so many ways that that's constrained. Similarly on the school side of course resources that's in the news right and left right now with so many schools being strapped for so many different things whether it's of course financial resources or manpower or the changing of of folks in different roles but that is also coupled with some distinct challenges right now with how do we engage students you know students have evolved I've been in this space for about 20 years first working in HR and then working in higher ed prior to my time at perku And you know it's been an interesting phenomenon to see the students particularly the postcoid students you know they are challenging group to engage by many accounts and so how do we help them get that real paid experience with the ROI that we all need to be able to again showcase to leadership that this is an effective program that students are are wanting that students are going to show up for. And so these constraints, they're universal. but one thing that want to share with what we're seeing is that with any of these partnerships, with any of these new programs, our goal is to make this as easy and as small of lift as possible. Whether you're school or an employer, that's the big thing and big part of our strategy is we want to make whatever approach you're implementing as simple for you as as we can because at the core, our logo, as you can see, it's ven diagram, we're here to support our three stakeholders. For students, we are focused on trying to help bridge the gap between college and career as equitably, as fairly as possible for as many students as we can. On the flip side, for companies, our goal is to help you recruit more effectively. We want to be means for you to access, engage, assess, and ultimately hire the best talent that you can for those early career roles at your company. Now, our methodology, as I'm sure most of you are aware, is through micro internship. But for today's conversation, want you to think about micro internships in perhaps little bit of different way because most of you and particularly if you're one of our partner institutions, you probably are familiar with short-term paid professional projects, which is what we do. But that's just piece of the puzzle. That's just the the fundamental, the core. Where the real power, where the real scale comes in is where it becomes where that micro internship, that project becomes more than just one employer working with one student. That happens all the time. We love that. But where you can achieve scale and what you really have to start thinking about is how this can be more than just just that onetoone relationship. How can you, if you're an employer, work with not just one student, but multiple students? way to think about this is if you're interviewing for that early career role, you're not going to just interview one student and hope that it all works out. You'll interview multiple. know when used to do college recruiting, tried to stack my post interview or postc career fair schedule with 13 slots and that's was limited based on the career center schedule, not mine. As many students as possibly could meet and I'm sure you all want to do the same thing. So, how do you work with these students as effectively as possible? Again, micro internships can give you that scale. Similarly, if you're advising students, we want them to have lots of different experiences so that they can figure out what they like, what they don't like, and hone in their decision-m process so that when it comes to internship time or full-time role decision- making, they have more data to be able to make those decisions more effectively. And that data is really the key through working on these different projects. both you if you are company or you if you work with students in schools have access to some really powerful metrics to help inform your decision-making and those are some of the data points and features that want to share with you and I'm excited to share with you tonight for today's conversation see already said tonight knew would do that at some point so when it comes to thinking about scale the way to start isn't so much to think about micro internship want to do some sort Focus on what are your particular goals? What's going to keep you up at night tonight or during the week if you're company? Is it that hard to fill role that you're trying that you're struggling? That you can't get enough interest that you're not able to meet the right talent. You're not sure if you're building the relationships with the right schools. maybe you go to career fairs and the students haven't heard of your organization. your brand awareness isn't what you are wanting it to be. Maybe you're looking for opportunities to deepen relationships with those target schools. Maybe you're looking to expand your school network. Those are just handful of the many goals that we hear from companies day in and day out. Those tend to be some of the most popular ones. Those are the ones we're going to be focusing on for some of the examples that I'm going to be sharing with you. But certainly, this is not designed to be comprehensive list. On the flip side, if you were school, maybe some of the goals that you're focusing on right now is how do either build or scale student interest in an in-class experiential learning initiative or how do help students get experience outside of the classroom, that resumeable experience that we want them to have that's going to be value added when they're trying to compete for those internship and full-time roles. Maybe you're looking for opportunities to engage alumni. you're trying to go beyond one-to-one mentorship or you're trying to just expand that even further. know there's been some conversation in the NACE community about that over the past few weeks. Maybe you're thinking about students that are underserved for variety of reasons. Now, I'm not talking specifically about DEI, although that could be population that you're considering, but maybe it's population such as student athletes where it's really challenging for them to pursue traditional internships. just to give you again one specific example, but would argue at the corner of no matter these goals, micro internships are tool in the tool belt that can help you. And by micro internships, know that phrase is something that has been used in variety of different contexts. Parker Dwey actually coined that phrase about 10 years ago when the company was started. How we define it still to this day is we're talking about projects that are short-term, paid, and professional. And they're projectbased. They have that defined deliverable so that the students have that real resumeable experience with real company when the experience is complete. And so how you can do this, as mentioned before, this term micro internships been floating around. Many of you may already have micro internship initiatives at your organization. Great. Fantastic. We love the fact that this is bringing more and more students these great opportunities and hopefully if you're company, you're finding great talent for your organizations. What want to tell you just little bit about is that we do have 10 years of experience doing this and have learned lot of things along the way to help make that as easy for you as possible. And particularly if your goal is how do scale that existing successful program anyone can do this but hopefully through these examples you're going to hear about you'll see that that 10 years of experience and these examples have helped you you know we've learned few things to make this easy and so from company's perspective the systems that we have in place to help you through the entire stage of the process the data that you have access to that can really help inform your hiring goals. All of those data points can help you make more informed decisions about who are the best students, schools, etc. that you should be spending your time and resources on. And if you're school, these programs are very quick and easy to launch. And we do our best to make them as accessible as possible with core aspect of that being that these are all paid experiences for your students. They're deliverable based. The students are going to have real resumeable experiences that they can talk about and use as that launchpad for the longer term experience. We are not suggesting that micro internship is full onetoone beautiful replacement of an internship. Far from it. But this is great resource to help you reach those students that can't do traditional internships or who may need few more experiences along the way so that they can make more informed decision about what is the right internship or full-time role for them and to be even more competitive for those opportunities. You're going to have all those as well as some really great data no matter what stakeholders that you're focusing on. And we know that it works because we see it in the data. So one of the things that we evaluate students on after micro internships is how that short-term experience impacted them based on all eight of the NACE career readiness competencies. And so you can see that overall holistically across all students that's where this data is based significant number of them are saying improved lot little and but even those at that reddish colored bar that's saying they no change but built confidence. We see lot of first and second year students and by lot mean when last counted the data it was over 30% of first and second year students are completing micro internships on Parker Dwey and so that confidence building piece to us is is still fantastic win for these students who might be struggling with the imposttor syndrome for instance. But we also ask students about some of those other outcomes from the experience such as you know how did it impact your ability to gain some other type of experience. So did they get new skills that they can showcase effectively on their resume? Did it help to document and prove that they have the skills that their resume says that they have? did it help them become more aware of company that may not have been on their radar? We hear that all the time from students that gosh, didn't know could do kind of work with this type of organization. and so those are incredibly effective and important data points not only for students but also for companies who may be looking at opportunities to build their brand. Again, the best way to scale these programs is if all stakeholders benefit and so employers, you too will see some significant value. Now this is based on the singular project and what employers are telling us that 96% of these companies are satisfied with that micro internship's final deliverable. Again the students do fantastic job but those companies that are using micro internships at scale that are have already decided yep want to use this as core element of my recruiting process. they're seeing the benefits on much larger scale that's informing their entire early career recruiting program. So, for example, if you're looking to expand your reach to reach populations that you're not reaching, again, broadly defined, we are super proud of the fact that over 80% of the students who are selected for micro internships come from historically underrepresented backgrounds. And again that's very broadly defined term including students who are PEL eligible students who are firstgen and so on. You can see that these students are the me these companies are really experiencing and enjoying significant increase in not only retention but also cost savings compared to some of the other traditional methods that they're using for early career recruiting. And again, you'll get these slides later. You can dig in further and we can certainly talk further about some of these metrics, but the case studies that I'm going to highlight will speak to this as well as you can see what the companies have shared with us in terms of how these programs have impacted their their roles. And so, how are companies using micro internships at scale? Well, to be clear, that onetoone one-time project is still very popular use case. So, if you have project that's on your to-do list that's just not going to get done before the end of the week and next week, maybe not either. Yeah, that's something you can use and post as micro internship and get that project done. Great. But want to encourage you to think beyond that because that's where you see the scale. It's where you really can enjoy some of this great data. And the two most popular reasons why companies and how companies are using micro internships to scale their early career recruiting, it falls into two camps. One is that they are trying to use the tool to confirm and find that student for that specific opportunity. So maybe it's that early career role that you recruit for year in and year out. every single year you're at career fair, maybe many, many career fairs, recruiting for that same opportunity. Great. Or maybe it's specific opportunity that an early career new hire, even graduate student could be interested in and have the skills for. Again, great. The projects that we see as micro internships that work really, really well in that use case tend to be what we internally kind of call audition projects. It's where you take project that would be similar to what somebody would do if they had that role and then have not just one student, but maybe five, maybe 10 students, maybe more, do that project. And this is really quick and easy way for these companies to see, however many students that they select and be able to compare student to student and etc., and not only evaluate them on whatever that final deliverable was, but through that deliverable, they're able to see the students core skills, the things that no matter what we're recruiting for, we all want to hire for things like attention to detail. Did that final deliverable have lots of typos? Was it professionally formatted and things like that? Was it clearly designed by AI? And we've all seen examples of that. So, unfortunately, that's something that's that's very very common. is it something that was turned in on time? Of course, everyone has deadlines with work, and we all need to to be able to sort some of that out. Wouldn't it be great to see if student struggles with turning things in on time before you even bring them on for something longer, more involved part of the hiring process? On the flip side, the other reason that companies are using micro internships at scale is to help with brand awareness, particularly engaging those students that are early in their academic programs. We see companies regularly post micro internships for those first and secondyear students to be able to start to get onto their radar. We're seeing that with the big accounting firms, companies that are starting super super early to engage those freshman and sophomores. Those are the ones that again are really excited about micro internships as that bite-sized experience to engage lots of students and to start saying that, hey, we are interested in wanting to build that relationship with you. We also see micro internships work really well as campus ambassador opportunities and you're going to see that in one of the case studies. And so without any more further ado, do want to share then the three different challenges that we're going to be focusing on for today's case studies. The first two are going to be employer-led examples from two different companies who were looking for how do use that micro internship that was the tool to be able to achieve the larger goal of hiring for specific role or how do use it to help deepen and build relationships with some of those schools that were already that they already had relationships with. The second set of examples are going to be from our university partners. And those are two different approaches. One is an inclass experiential learning program and the other is an outside of class that also involves engaging alumni. Again, we'll talk more about that shortly. And then the third set of examples are ones that are literally going on right now, like right this week. My slides are already out of date, so I'll share that with you in moment. But this is an opportunity for you to hear what are some strategies working right now from two different organizations. One is one of our nonprofit partners and the other is university business school. Now for every one of these programs there's some key lessons learned and characteristics that wanted to share with you at the onset. First and foremost, these programs tend to start small with pilot that maybe is 10 to 20 projects, maybe 10 to 20 students. This is not something that typically launches with 100 students or 100 micro internships at the onset. Start small, prove it out, learn. The second thing is that they start by focusing on the employer's needs and goals. And if you work at school, that might seem little bit counterintuitive, but believe me, that's what makes it most effective. Case in point, one of our university partners is working with us real time where they are really excited about supporting sophomores. However, the message that they sent out to all of their employers, they sent out to all of their employers and they've gotten some interest, but only from those employers that really have expressed an interest because they're interested in building their brand with sophomores. Most of their employers don't have that focus and are saying, you know what, that's great, but we want juniors and seniors. So, the sophomores, it's just not we're not ready for that yet. And so again thinking about meeting the employers where they are to align with their goals. That's truly truly critical. The third point is that students need to opt in to participating. That's another big lesson learned that we've seen from some of the schools that have said hey you know what we want to have every student do one of these. Great. We do two. But the reality is not every student is ready to pursue micro internship, an opportunity where they're going to need to be professional, that they're going to need to communicate effectively, that they're going to need to work in an environment that's not necessarily they're going to have that hands-on. lot of these are remote and just not every student is at the stage of development where they are ready for that. And so by forcing them, that sometimes means that the students willingness to be successful and the final deliverable may not be quite where you want it to be at at your institution. And then the last big lesson learned is to keep this as open to as many students and employers as possible and particularly in the pilot stage. And the reason want to stress that is because sometimes we have partners that'll say, "You know what? We really want to support these academic year students from this particular major." Great. We do too. You can market it certainly to them. But if their roommate is not in that program and they hear about it, that can cause some ill will potentially. But even more than that, particularly when program is just getting started, none of us know what the appetite is going to be at your institution or at your company. Who's going to be most excited about this? Who's going to say, "Gosh, didn't realize that needed this particular talent from this particular type of of institution, but gosh, here we are." It was interesting few few weeks ago colleague and were looking at some of the micro internships that she had hosted on you know with within her team and she works in marketing and lot of the students that she had worked with were not business students. They came from the liberal arts. good lesson learned though about you know we sometimes we have these intuitive thoughts but they may not be accurate and these bite-sized projects about who is the best talent can really help to sort out and broaden our our our horizons and counter some of those stereotypes that that we may have. The other thing with these programs is from the very beginning they have clear outcomes and goals and those are mutual goals. We're on the same team. That's one reason why we like to call the terminology we use is is partnerships because that's truly what this is when you work with us here at Parker Dwey. We want to understand what do you want? What is what how would you define success for this particular initiative? Do you want to hire number of students from this particular state majoring in this? Great. Good for us to know if you're company or if you're school. You want to have students say that it was phenomenal experience. you really want to engage students from this mage. Okay, great. And again, we can provide then more helpful suggestions of how to help you achieve those goals. And again, with that 10 years of experience, we've learned lot of things about what works and what might need to be tweaked. And that shared learning is really, really key as well. What are you hearing from your colleagues that have utilized micro internships? What did you hear from the students and employers that you engaged? things like that so that we can all share that knowledge and tweak the program accordingly. So the first program that want to share with you again is an employer facing program. It's with company multinational an industrial company called Train Technologies. I'm particularly grateful for Train because they're powering my air conditioning right now and it's 100° here at 11:30 at night in Bangkok. So thank you Train. Really glad you do what you do so well. But for students, an HVAC company is just not exactly the type of organization that is going to have the line out the door at the career fair. And for their particular needs, they were really interested in using micro internships to engage students for technical roles. They do lot of engineering recruiting, but then they also had robust campus ambassador program that they were looking to scale at some of their target institutions. So they had multiaceted approach. Their hiring managers had relationships with faculty and so they wanted to leverage those to be able to promote those opportunities. And again, the campus ambassador program, they leaned in on using their pool of previous interns as way to engage and identify those campus ambassadors. And so what they had with all these different programs is some great ideas, but they needed one universal system to pull it all together and to make it easy for their HR team. And as you can hear from Shannon the her primary contact over there, but we've got with the multiple programs, got lots of other folks that have said similar things. They're saying that just we need an easy way to do this. We don't have enough hours in the day to be able to man all of the logistics in the admin. So Parker Dwey again makes that easy. And just to give you couple of illustrations for how they implemented this, this particular example is what it looks like on the employer side for those technical engineering type of projects. Don't ask me what circularity, return, location means, but the engineering students at those four target institutions which were those companies that they were looking to those those schools they were looking to deepen their relationships with. That's who they focused on. That's how they marketed this for this particular project. Similarly, they also posted campus ambassador projects for bunch of different schools to be able to again easily scale program that was already going really well, but they just needed an administrative resource to be able to expand it even further. And so holistically, Shannon and the others who are leading this program can see some really powerful data to be able to inform where are they seen the most traction. What are the schools that have had the largest number of applicants versus those who've been selected? That can help them to really narrow that target list of schools, particularly if they're seeing engagement from schools that may not be one of their core schools. So for instance, you see and that yellow arrow points to there were 29 different schools that they were able to see students from. 19 of those were not their core focused schools. And so without even stepping foot on campus, they were able to at least start to scout out what is the the talent like at these other institutions which can help inform their strategy and make it so that they're able to use their resources more further more stringently in the future. And all of those applicants that they've worked with, they all become part of pool of candidates that they can engage or re-engage for future opportunities. And that list of applicants is downloadable, something that they can again access, you know, implement and again re-engage those students accordingly. Another example again from company is plastics manufacturer called Holland and again company that that most students probably have never heard of. In their case they originally hosted micro internships for finance role of finance if you're not finance major. They were really interested in how do inform students they have this entry level early career role. so they use that micro internship as way to source talent and targeting specific local colleges for that particular hiring initiative. Now again, career fairs in their case were not going to be very effective because comp students didn't know what they were and they weren't recruiting for ton of roles. But that micro internship allowed them to engage top tier talent. So much so that not only did they have that estimated 17 to $18,000 savings, which is what the the team shared with us, but they also expanded it for other hard to fill roles in their case in in supply chain. And what makes me even more excited, especially coming from HR, is that those students did so well that they not only got hired full-time, but they stayed. All of them stayed for over two years at that company. And again, that's not retention that you can easily see. According to NA data, the most former interns, 77% stay at least year. But again in this case 100% retention which has some real ROI for to really showcase the model. The second story that want to share with you and it's we're going to switch gears now is focusing on university examples and see the question in the chat around can micro internships be offered at specific times of the year. Absolutely. An example I'm going to share here with Sworthmore. It did not start out that way but it evolved into that. So in the case of Sworthmore like many schools they created micro internship program in the early days after co they went to their alumni and said the summer is going to be really really challenging for our students. Can you support them via paid remote experiences and so they actually started the program running it on their own and we got involved about year after the program had been created when they saw that it was great program. lot of students and and alumni were excited about it, but it was really really heavy lift, very lot of time consumed to be able to scale. It was just not going to be feasible for their team. So we got involved in 2021 and have been running it for the past five almost five years now. and our role is we you know end to end. So they use our platform for hosting the projects. We support their alumni with not only making sure that the projects align with their specific requirements. We manage all of the student application. The students are selected by the alumni but we manage the payment to the students and then the data for the Sworthmore team is aggregated within our system and available on demand for them. Now they initially decided to have this be an ongoing program all throughout the year but for variety of reasons. couple years ago, they said, "You know what? We just want to focus now on when students are most available." And in their case, they chose winter break. And so, you can see the outcomes from the most recent winter break that just took place just few months ago. So, 83 students participating, 78 alumni or or friends of the institution. They open it up to parents as well. but what I'm particularly excited to share with you with the Sworthmore example is in especially in light of our conversation about scaling is not just how Sworthmore has this successful program that they are supporting year after year, but how the alumni are so hungry for this program that they want to come back year after year and when it's not available, they're opting to self-fund and engage the students to do more and that 10% who immediately self-funding more micro internships that's happening organically. That is not goal of this program. The alumni are demanding that they want to work with the students more and more. Sworthmore is not telling them not to, but they're not promoting it to encourage them to do so. This is just happening with the alumni saying, "Hey, can do more?" And we'll say, "Yeah, of course." And that has resulted in the most recent iteration with $6,500 additional revenue that's been earned by these students because these alumni have really really seen the value of this particular program. And going back to the data, this is also something that the Sworthmore team has really been able to see. And in their case, they have hundreds of students that have and benefited from this particular program. And thank you to Christie for for the nice testimonial about their experience working with us. but this is something that we're really excited because not only does it help those students and alumni, but for the Sworthmore team in particularly those student focused teams, this really helps to give them some powerful insights about their students performance. And so for instance, if you're looking on aggregate, you can see that employers are are saying largely, yep, the students are doing nice job on their overall skill level. They're turning the work in on time, etc. But the one area of opportunity that that maybe they could do little bit more is in communication, especially when you narrow that data down to looking at students at an individual level and you see comment like, you know, the intern started out okay, but think she overestimated how much time she had to work on it, etc. That becomes really powerful data point for career advisor to be able to say, okay, who was that student? Let's go ahead and give them some proactive coaching so that they can learn from this experience so that the next time when they're competing for that internship or that full-time role, they can really have that moment and be able to grow from this experience. That's where the data becomes particularly powerful and exciting. Similarly, we're seeing with Lewis and Clark College, they are focusing not on an outside of class experience, but they're actually working with us on their in-class internship program. and this particular program has very high class problem in that they have more employers than students. And so that's, you know, again, great experience and great position for them. They engage the employers in this case by going to alumni and local businesses that really love working with their entrepreneurship and leadership center to support these students on this in-class internship. Where we come into play is how do they effectively and easily match the students with these employers? And so again, it's competitive process. The alumni or these employers post their projects. We help them if the project is not necessarily good fit for an internship. We'll help them with the size and scope and provide that one-on-one support, but then the students compete for these. They're having to select which ones they want to apply for and they're having to get picked by that company. And so that competitive experience simulates what they're going to experience in the real world, making this much more authentic engagement process as part of that internship course. And then again in the spirit of scaling as you can see from what Chris was sharing is that this is helping the alumni of seeing and the these employers are seeing such value that they're coming back year in year out. They appreciate the ease of working with this. These alumni by the way they are paying for these opportunities. It's revenue cost share that again we help support the college in in helping to invoice and and pay the students appropriately. earlier today, for instance, one employer specifically said, "Can we pay the student more because they're just so phenomenal?" And again, we handle all of that administratively and make this just one less thing that the school has to to worry about and providing again this great experience for the students and employers. Which leads me to my last set of examples. How do partners who are trying to engage new employers use the micro internship? And so for this first example, want to highlight nationwide nonprofit organization that supports thousands of students from underrepresented backgrounds and has network of dozens of colleges and universities and may even include your institution. They have robust nationwide program. Their challenge is that there's very limited opportunities for students to receive paid internships and they have no employer engagement team. And so their strategy for how to engage employers is very robust strategy of going to those partner universities and saying do you have companies who want to work with our students and similarly students go seek out internships and opportunities that would otherwise be unpaid and this nonprofit organization provides the funding for that. Now Parker Dwey became involved with this organization back in fall of 2022. Just like said before, started with small pilot, just few schools that were initially involved and has now expanded to support dozens of schools. We're running three different programs with them concurrently right now. And students have literally earned millions for doing these experiences that otherwise would have been unpaid for them. Not only that, these companies are coming back again and again and again and they are hiring these students on their own dime for these longer term experiences or wanting to work with them repeatedly as many times as they can. The outcomes that you're seeing on the slide, this program is going on right now, it just launched in January of and so it's what, April 24th today. so those 70 students that are hired, that's actually outdated. It's now 72 as of yesterday. So again, these are happening real time. Some real outcomes of for students that again would have otherwise not had these opportunities and the employers are having such great experience that not only are they getting wide numbers of participation rates and again with no experience or no employer engagement teams, but these companies are demanding and wanting to hire as many of the students as they possibly can. So, it's really helping to achieve that scale very organically because of the success of this well-run program and these many partnerships from all different facets of of all the different stakeholders. And then the second example that want to share with you under this topic is land grant called the university's business school. now this particular program was launched as pilot during winter break. This past winter break, we did 22 micro internships with them. but their particular goal was not only to develop this program to support sophomores and juniors largely at their institution, but they were also looking for creative way to engage employers that don't otherwise work at their institution. So, they're not already recruiting at the school. How do we get them to realize that this is great place to recruit? And so through our collaboration as well as with theirs, we have engaged companies predominantly in their region of the United States and are really focused on not only regional employers but also alumni who work at organizations that again are not recruiting at that at that institution. And so most of those employers in the pilot were new to that school. And similarly right now the employers just wrapping up this week the posting of these opportunities for the summer internship program. Now the summer program is expanding. We've also learned some lessons about how to run this program more effectively. As mentioned earlier these characteristics of successful program is when we're all learning from each other. And so one of the lessons learned for this particular program is the pilot only had 20our internships or 20our projects. Great. But the employer said they actually want longer experiences so that they can provide even more robust projects to these students and engage them and mentor them even more deeply and meaningfully than they otherwise could for shorter project. And so the school in this case said, "Okay, we will we'll allow two different options and we're keeping it at 20 or 40. The company can choose what works best for their schedule and availability and the project. And this allows both the company and the students additional flexibility to be able to work on these these projects that again work best for their particular needs and schedule. That's where micro internship becomes particularly effective and valuable for us. It's very easy to scale these partnerships to do more 20 hours, more 40-hour projects, doesn't matter. But it is makes it so much easier to be able to offer these additional options for companies. really helps them to say yes lot more easily. summer internship too often is is too much of of lift, too hard for them to say, "Yeah, think can do that." But these shorter term projects just makes it lot easier for these companies that that may not have the infrastructure to otherwise participate. So, where this all leads us and what I'm particularly excited to be able to share with you is resource that you can hopefully take these examples that we just discussed and be able to implement this at your company and at your or at your organization or school. So again, starting with you if you're company, our suggestions with this playbook, first of all, start small as mentioned by just picking one particular project that aligns to that early career role that you're already going to every career fair to to recruit for. What is that challenging role that that you are seeking to fill? Don't worry about what that project is. We can help. We have lots of expertise in designing these projects that'll help sort out what are the core skills that you want students to have to be able to showcase through that project and then work with three maybe five students on that particular project. It's up to you how many students you want to choose but again we suggest around five students so that you can see all those students in action. When designing these projects, we have variety of different mechanisms to help it make it so it's an easy lift for your team to evaluate the work of these particular projects. The deliverable is things like research report or PowerPoint presentation or something that manager can quickly sort through and sift through to be able to see yes, the student has the skills, the thoughtfulness, the the core things that I'm looking for or this candidate wasn't quite as as strong. And so reviewing those outcomes and being able to see, did that student perform? Do they fit with what you're looking for can help you to identify, is that student the right one to move forward in your hiring process. Are they the ones that you want to shortlist for that internship that you're going to be recruiting for or even that full-time role. Start small, hire multiple students. That's how you can scale. And you can offer this to the question earlier at any time of the year even including right now if there's still some open roles that you're trying to fill. These particular programs and initiatives can easily scale and something that could be implemented within week. That is not an unreasonable timeline for micro internship initiative to get started. On the university side, we again focus in on what is that one goal? Is it specific student population that you're trying to support? Is this something that know to give you specific example? We ran program over winter break where that school was providing funding for the micro internships, but they were focused on supporting students who were in academic programs that are typically underpaid or unpaid internships. So in their case, it was programs like social work, arts, design, things like that. Or maybe your target is particular employer that you want to support. We have another program where the schools are funding these projects specifically for students who to gain experience in public service careers. And so in their case, they're only looking at supporting organizations that are nonprofits within their state or are state agencies. And again, that's helping the students to learn about public service while also supporting their local community at this state institution. Additionally, you can look at picking three maybe five employers to be able to deepen or build those relationships with. So to give you yet another example, we have partner right now who has engaged faculty and identified employers and this particular faculty are teaching sales class and so they've gone to their network of employers and have said hey we have some students that are still looking at hiring getting hired for these sales roles. Can you offer this project, an audition type of project that can help you identify these students strengths, weaknesses and give them that real sales experience. And so that program is being led by faculty member in terms of engaging those students that are good fit for that particular opportunity and really helping to deepen that relationship with that local company at that at that school. And then have that be program. have that be something that there's clear goals, clear initiative, and again, we can help sort that. The playbook will walk you through the steps to think about. And in terms of measuring the results, well, here are the KPIs that we frequently see and recommend that you track. Participation numbers, yes, and there's lots of different things that you can think about when it comes to measuring participation, but also looking at the quality metrics. And again, our platform provides you all of these metrics on demand, so you can have access to them whenever your senior leadership says they need an update. You've got it right there on hand. and then same thing with what those outcomes are. Particularly if you're company, you can be able to see what are the departments that are utilizing micro internships most at your organization. What's the quality of the deliverables that are being produced, etc. That's how you achieve the scale is where you see this with not just onetoone but one to many relationships then in students that are engaged and and and really are starting to see the growth over time. And so with that know that there is QR code that will lead you to this workbook that you can certainly check out but know QR codes aren't always that easy to access on webinar. So, I'll also put that in the chat for those of you who are joining us live. Feel free to take look at that workbook and go ahead and and start talking through this with your senior leadership team. If you if you're interested and open to discussing brainstorming, we would honor be honored to collaborate with you and be able to brainstorm with you to see what might be good fit to share additional case studies based on what we've seen work most effectively. And with that, I'm going to take breath and go ahead and see what questions are that may have missed in the chat and and certainly in the Q&A. so first of all, the first question said something about this sounds like an audition. Am thinking about this right? Yeah. So, think this was in reference to the company example where if you're hiring for specific role, you might have project that would relate to that role. It would be something similar to what that student would do if they had that real role. And that's exactly way to think of it. as somebody who enjoys the performing arts, yes, an audition is way to think of it or practice before the big game. But this is way again to see the student in action. case study is another way to think of it, but it's actually performing real work. And so if the student is not fit, doesn't get hired, they still will have that resumeable experience. They'll still have built that relationship with you. We've seen companies who have done audition projects with student and maybe that student wasn't great fit for the role that they were auditioning for, but it opened up some possibilities and the students have been re-engaged for different roles. And so there's lot of flexibility around that. that short-term experience can really help provide some enlightening insights. Another question, can share the work students do with hiring manager before they do the interview when share their resume? Yeah, great suggestion, great idea. That's another technique that we're seeing employers use this for is if your hiring manager is not involved initially in the recruitment process, this is great way for them to help you shortlist who might be the most effective students to move forward. we've seen that this not only helps the hiring managers to get involved earlier and just have them have little bit more of that inherent interest, but it also results in more effective hires on on longer term. That's one of the key reasons think why the effectiveness numbers in terms of student retention is so high with students who've done these micro internships. let's see. like this for when go to career fair especially when we aren't going to interview for few months. Does it work for that? Absolutely. In fact, we have seen these audition projects work out really well at info sessions. So, for instance, you have bunch of students come to the conference room for the info session. Great. You're talking about your company, but how much more of great carrot this could be for those who attended the info session to then have QR code offering them an opportunity to apply right there on the spot for micro internship. So, you can start seeing that student and begin working with them. We've seen that at career fairs, but this is also something that we're seeing with info sessions as well. So, lot of different ways to tie in your onampus initiatives with micro internship program as well. Let's see. And have you identified any trends in what students need to know or be prepared for before they go into the internships to optimize their experience? good question. and I'm assuming in this case, well, at least the context I'll explain this in is in micro internship. but in terms of what the students need to know, it's very project specific. And so with every project, on Parker Dwey at least, there is going to be very specific deliverable that the student needs to be able to complete in order to execute the project. There also may be some skills that are listed as well. And what we always encourage students and and tell students in our newsletters and all of our communications with them when they sign up as well as in our webinars for them is don't apply if you're not qualified. Now, we know students they're not always the best at reading, but that's big take-home message. Those of you who are working in with students to make sure that they are reading these these descriptions carefully and not applying because micro internships are competitive and we want to make sure that the students are not wasting their time by applying for something that they don't have the the skills yet to be able to to pursue. This also though might be good coachable moment for student if they see project that sounds really interesting. if you're working with them. We've seen schools that have said, "Well, gosh, don't apply for that yet. You don't have skill, but this class will help you get that skill or you may want to look into this extra training program on an platform, an open source platform to help you develop some of those skills. is there way to view current or previous projects from employers?" so good question. You can see the micro internships that are available on Parker Dwey at least right now and just on on student account. One thing to know is that most of the micro internships are specific to certain students based on where they go to school or other affiliations that they may have. And so share that with you because yes, companies, you have the option, as you actually saw earlier, to exclusively post micro internship just for students at whatever your target schools are. And so we always tell our university partners that if you want to see more projects for your students, you've got to share this with your employers because more and more employers are featuring these opportunities just to the schools where they already have those relationships. and so that's that's very important strategy to help your students be more successful. It's also really great way to deepen your list of options for how employers can work with your students. as far as if you're an employer, yes, there are ways for your if you are in HR for instance and you want to see has our don't know accounting team ever done micro internship. Yes, there is access that you can be given to be able to get that holistic perspective of of what has at least occurred on Parker Dwey at your organization prior to hear your involvement. let's see another question says on the slide the universities said moment for universities moment ago it talked about us funding the micro internships there was money bag icon but is there way we can do this for free where the employers would pay if we don't have the funds absolutely we have seen for example different programs where schools have gone to their nonprofit organizations or other employers and have said Hey, this is an opportunity like an additional sponsorship initiative where yes, they can go ahead and and earmark that funding for projects at that particular institution. but yes, as mentioned actually with the Louiswis and Clark example, that is one where it was joint school and employer pay model. So it really it's it can be done number of of different ways. We've also seen schools that have successfully raised funds for micro internship program after an initial pilot was funded. So for example, we had small program with university that just tied to some faculty budget within the business school and they ran the pilot worked really really well and so they took the data from that that we provided for them and went to their alumni and their alumni funded massive increase that was turned the program into universitywide initiative. can you provide contact information if we'd like to share with our university teammates set up an online meeting? Yeah, absolutely. so know you'll get some follow-up information from Nace. will put my email in the chat and if am not the right person in terms of whatever questions, etc. that you have, particularly since my time zone is so different from where you probably are, will go ahead and and steer you in different direction if my schedule and availability isn't the best for for for whatever might be helpful for you. let's see. And do we have significant number of remote micro internship options for global campus students? Love that question. Particularly the global campus aspect. My last higher ed experience was at the University of Maryland global campus. So totally understand. and yes last time did the the analysis is over 91% of the micro internships that have been completed on our platform were remote opportunities. The company does have the option to choose if they want to engage the student remotely or on site. Whenever they are on the fence, we always encourage them make it remote. It just makes the logistics easier for the student, the company and all that. But more importantly, it makes it more accessible so that they can engage students that don't have the transportation or ability to to get to that office. So, that's something that is really really great question. let's see. What advice or additional insight should we keep in mind for international students? great another great question. so yes, we do see international students participate in micro internships, but it is very university specific how they are able to go about this. We've seen CPT being used effectively and it again depends on the institution and the major and all the rules around CPT. We often will also see pre-MP completion OPT as well. our guidance for the student when they sign up for the platform and when they are selected, they receive messaging in both cases to say go talk to your school's international office. We don't want the student to get in trouble, but we also don't know the student's situation or what's going on at your institution to be able to advise them appropriately. That's not our role. So, we send them to the experts to your institution. And so, we want to make sure they get that guidance and and we do address and and share that with them whenever when they sign up and when they're selected. let's see. And then think this last question, this seems really easy for companies. Is there something I'm missing? Why shouldn't offer these projects? love the question. it truly is designed to be easy. That's the one big lesson learned that we've seen over and over again and hear all the time from companies is that this is easy. with some of our funded programs, we often will hear the comment, "This seems too good to be true, is scam." No, it's not. Genuinely, we want to help. We are missiondriven organization. Full stop. That's why I'm still here because truly am passionate about what we're doing and trying to help make the world slightly better place in my tiny corner of the influence. That's why I'm midnight. It's Saturday my time to talk with you about this because I'm really passionate and want to help and know my team and colleagues do as well. and so for you if you're company or if you're school, we'd be honored to continue the conversation, support however we can. If you already have an existing program, we'd love to learn about it and learn with you and share it to the extent that we can to make it even more effective. but think we're at the top of the hour and before get yanked off the stage or however that works with the webinar, again, thank you so so much for joining us. have wonderful rest of your Friday and it's Saturday's already looking great if you in my time zone. and great weekend. Jasmine, I'll I'll send it back over to you. Yes. Thank you so much, Kristen, for your time today for this wonderful webinar and thank you all who have attended. hope everyone has great rest of your day.