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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years

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Micro-Internships: How to Leverage the Gig Economy to Find Great Young Talent.

Count me as a big fan of college internships.

I’ve told this story before, but I trace my long career as a journalist and media executive back to my college internship on the Metro Desk of the Los Angeles Times.

I got class credit instead of pay, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted a chance to write something that actually got published in the LA Times, and the internship gave me the opportunity to do that about a half-dozen times. I’m eternally grateful for the experience because it gave me the chance to prove myself in a professional setting.

But that was then. Now college internships — paid, unpaid, and for class credit — seem to be on the upswing again. In fact, there’s even a hot new internship trend that seems totally in synch with our 21st-century workplace.

If you like the gig economy, you’ll love micro-internships.

Just what is a micro-internship?

Forbes recently described them like this:

“Micro-internships are short-term, paid, professional assignments that are similar to those given to new hires or interns. They usually consist of 5 to 40 hours of work, and can occur any time of year. They are highly specific, project-based positions, often in arenas like lead generation, content creation, or data entry. Students receive a fixed fee, typically equating to $15 to $25 per hour, and are given between one week and one month to complete their project.”

Jeffrey Moss, CEO of Parker Dewey, the organization that pioneered this concept, talked to me recently about the differences between traditional internships and micro-internships, and the benefits for today’s college students. He said:

“Regular internships are wonderful. I’m a huge fan of them. They are a great way to learn about companies, about different industries, different roles, and a great way for companies to learn about students from different backgrounds.

The problem is that there are not enough of those. What we recognized is that there’s an opportunity year round for college students to work on short-term projects. Whereas a typical summer internship may be 8 to 10 weeks over the course of a summer, micro internships are project based. They tend to require anywhere from 5 to 30 or maybe 40 hours in total. They tend to be due anywhere from a few days to a few weeks out, and, they can take place year-round.”

How does this kind of internship work?

That sounds good, but what does a manager, HR professional or internship coordinator do to make a micro-internship happen? Here’s how Jeffrey Moss described it:

“We wanted to make it as easy as possible for both sides. A company has someone log into Parker Dewey and post a project. What do you need done? When do you need it? How much do you want to pay? We want someone to do competitive research on blah, blah, blah. We want it to kick off on February 28. We need it done March 15. We think it will take you 20 hours. We’ll pay you $400. Companies post those projects on Parker Dewey.

What happens next is that college students and recent graduates who are on our site will see the project. They have ownership over if they want to apply or not. They might look at a project and say, ‘Oh, I’m in finals week, I don’t have time.’ Or, they might look at it and say, ‘Oh, I never thought about a role in the financial services industry, but this looks sort of intriguing. Let me click a button and apply.’

They apply for the projects, the companies see all the applicants, pick who they want, and then work directly with the individual for the duration of the project.

It’s important to know that we do zero marketing to the college students and recent graduates. Every one of the college students is on our platform because they want to be. We don’t even allow colleges to require that.”

Not replacing the traditional internship

Here’s my big question: Are micro-internships intended to take the place of the traditional summer or semester-long internships? Will they put the old model out of business?

Jeffrey Moss says “no.”

“To be clear, we’re not trying to replace the 10-week internship. This lets students dip their toe in the water. …If I’m a tech student, for instance, I might think I only want to work at Google or Facebook, but then I see an interesting project for JP Morgan that’s tech related. I get to dip my toe in the water and find that ‘Oh wow, JP Morgan is doing some interesting stuff on tech. Maybe this is worth me exploring more.’ It’s a pathway to the traditional internship, not the replacement.

The students immediately get it–they can get professional experience. They can get in the door. They can demonstrate skills and even get paid for it. They love it. On the company side, it’s interesting because we have two different stakeholder groups. One is the individual hiring manager, the busy professional.

Their point of pain is, ‘I have too much work on my plate, so maybe I can have a college kid help with some of those projects.’ These are things that for someone with 5, 10, or 20 years of experience may not be the highest and best use of time, but for a college kid, they’re going to be pretty interested. They love it.

On our platform, for the duration of the project, the student is actually a 1099 independent contractor of Parker Dewey. We provide fixed fee consulting services to our clients. In the words of one financial services organization, we’re like going to a consulting firm. We’re like going to McKinsey. When that firm works with McKinsey, they don’t have any employment law related interaction with the consultants at McKinsey–the same way they don’t with us. Again, that makes it easy.

The second thing is that we have no conversion fee. There’s no temp to perm ever, and we guarantee we never will do that because we want companies to use this platform as a pathway to hire, and we want the students to use it as a way to find a job. We don’t want a situation where the company says, ‘Oh, I was going to hire Geoff, but I have to go pay someone 20 percent of his first year’s salary. Let me look at someone else. Or, instead of paying her 60 grand, I’m only going to pay her 50 because I have to go pay some staffing firm.’

We don’t charge any of that. Those two things get rid of a lot of the risk for companies, and once we explain all those things, the whole conversation changes.”

The view from a college student

This all makes micro-internships sound pretty interesting, but what do the people on the other side of the coin–the students and the companies offering internships–think of them?

Suzan Batamuliza did a micro-internship shortly after graduating with a finance degree from Chicago’s Roosevelt University back in 2015. She told me:

“I graduated with a finance degree, but I was never sure what I was going to use it for. So I went to Parker Dewey. I think I must have seen a Facebook post from somebody about it. But I ended up on their website and I’m looking and I’m thinking, ‘This is interesting. I could try out different types of work.’ My understanding was that you work on a project, see if you like it, get paid for it, then move to the next project, work on it, see if you like it, an so on. I was thinking that this is the best way I can figure out what it is I want to do.

I applied for maybe two or three projects that I thought I might be interested in, and one of the projects was with MHolland (a plastics company in Chicago). I worked in their credit department and I was going to help them with some credit reviews.

So I get to MHolland and I do a good job. I was supposed to work for them for two weeks, which is what I thought the project was going to be, but they ended up extending it for a month. A month became three months, and at the end of the three months, they were saying, ‘We like the work you’re doing. You seem to understand everything that is happening. We would like you to interview for a full-time job.’ And so I ended up becoming a full-time employee.

Without the micro-internship, I would have never had that opportunity to go in, even for a short time, and make the connections and build that network. That is something Parker Dewey did for me.

To give you a bit more context on MHolland, I was the first junior analyst they ever hired. They had always hired experienced professionals. They took a chance on bringing in a student like me, and they taught me pretty much everything.

Micro-internships are allowing companies to take a chance on students. They could easily pick a professional who has done this before and that would probably be easier. But at the end of the day, you want your company to keep growing, so you want to attract talent. And finding talent this way grows the company, right?”

What an employer thinks

Daniel Hartman has a similar perspective. He’s a Senior Account Executive at LogicGate, a Chicago-based SaaS company that creates flexible business process management software. He’s worked at a number of other companies, including six years in senior roles at LinkedIn.

Here’s what he told me:

“Parker Dewey is doing a great service for the market and for businesses to get access to this type of talent and this type of employment arrangement. It’s really important for students who do not otherwise have opportunities to get in front of these companies.

I’ve used them (mico-internships) a few times. In all cases, I was looking for more than just a one-and-done project. I was looking for somebody to work on a temporary, part-time basis, over an extended time period. And, it worked out that way.

Of course, one of the benefits is the ‘try before you buy’ situation, so I can get real work done without the commitment of a full internship. Each time I used this service, I was at hyper-growth startups that had no established formal internship program, at least not within the sales organization. There was no formal mechanism for me to hire an intern, so I got approval to do this (a micro-internship) on a project basis and managed it myself.

The first time I did it, we posted the project and I was looking for someone that would, after the end of the project, continue to work with me. And it worked out that way. We got a great candidate named Tarek. He completed the initial project and did a fantastic job. It evolved into a formal paid internship where I did get HR involved to formalize it. We were able to have him as a contract employee and work around his school schedule. He continued on for almost a year.

It was the best possible experience, Tarek was learning, he got paid, and of course, he got great experience and a reference from me–and he was absolutely able to leverage that very specific experience and my reference into landing himself a job out of college.”

Danny Hartman told me that he had about four or five students he had brought in as micro-interns, and that, “they all worked out very well.”

When I asked him what it cost to bring in a student under a micro-internship, he said that, “I typically paid (interns) $15 an hour, and an initial project would be about 30 hours.”

Internships in ways nobody considered

Here’s my take: Forbes says that Parker Dewey has helped more than 1,000 students complete micro-internships at companies such as Microsoft, CBRE, Dell, and Leo Burnett. Those are smart, successful companies. If micro-internships are good enough for them, well, they’re probably good enough for lots of other organizations, too.

I’m for any and all internships that allow more students to get some well-needed professional experience that can jump-start their career. Micro-internships seem to be a new and very modern way of doing that.

The gig economy has gotten a bad rap in many corners. Even The New York Times questioned whether it was even reshaping the economy.

Well, guess what? The growing success of micro-internships shows that it absolutely is reshaping things in ways nobody even considered before.

As I said, I’m a big fan of college internships, because as a part-time college professor, I know how they can really be the big break a hard-working student needs to get their career going. And micro-internships show how the gig economy can help with that.

Maybe it’s time for you and your organization to get on board and take a chance with one.

The post Micro-Internships: How to Leverage the Gig Economy to Find Great Young Talent. appeared first on Fistful of Talent.

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realtalk-princeton · 7 years

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Roonil, how did you decide on an advisor/project for your JP? I'm planning to do COS IW in the spring, and I'm super intimidated thinking about working on an advanced project with only a few classes of background. And also intimidated about asking a professor to work with me, I don't feel like I really know most of them or their work.

Response from Roonil Wazlib:

So if it’s your first time doing iW, the COS department actually recommends and wants you to do your IW through a COS IW seminar (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/ugrad/independent-work/independent-work-seminars). You rank your preferences and then get put into seminar, where basically every student in the seminar is doing an IW project that falls under the seminar’s category (like Natural Language Processing) and is advised by the same professor. If you get put into a seminar, this kind of helps you narrow down a potential project - you also don’t need to decide on a project until like the first 1-3 weeks of the semester, and you have a chance to talk to your advisor about it. This makes it less intimidating because you don’t need to directly reach out to a professor - you just submit a form (like a bunch of other students do).

I’m working with a professor one on one because I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do, and it didn’t fall under any of the IW seminar topics. I encountered the professor in a class I took in the past, so I just directly emailed and asked. Don’t be worried/intimidated about emailing professors - they probably have tons of experience dealing with students who need an IW advisor, and the worst thing they can do is say no because they’re too busy. If you realize you want to do something that doesn’t fall under any of the IW seminars, scroll through the list of CS professors and see what subjects they specialize in, and email the ones that match with your interests. If you really can’t figure out what professors might be good, I would even set up an appointment with Kernighan (he is literally one of my favorite professors at Princeton, he’s the nicest, sweetest grandfather figure you could ever ask for) and talk to him about what you’re interested in, and he would likely know which professors might align with your interests because he’s dep rep.

Your project is advanced but it doesn’t have to be insanely complicated (my IW could be considered the backend of a glorified 333 project), and you have tons of resources (like Google and StackOverflow and existing APIs, don’t have to worry about being honor coded for Googling problems!!) plus your advisor, so don’t fret! Tons of other juniors are in the same spot as you.

Hope this helps!

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our-beginnings · 7 years

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Michael Chase, Senior Software Engineer at Ancestry

Tell us a bit about who you are, and what you do now.

My name is Michael Chase, and I’m currently a Senior Software Engineer at Ancestry. I serve as a full stack engineer (across both front and back end) and architect for my team at Ancestry. I’m also an active member of DevColor, a contributor to the Sequel app project, and a crypto-currency trader.

What do you get up to day-to-day at Ancestry? What’s one of your favourite things about working there?

My day-to-day at Ancestry usually starts off with me making my famed breakfast of plain oatmeal with a cut-up apple and cinnamon. I catch up on emails and Slack, and try to write any last minute code (usually Javascript or Node) before the daily standup. After that, we might have a technical discussion or some other meetings, and I then spend an hour or two working before lunch. Currently, we’re working on a survey project to collect phenotypic data (that is, observable characteristics/traits). After lunch, more meetings and writing code.

One of my favourite things about Ancestry is the people. I consider myself very lucky to be on such a great team with talented engineers and a great manager.

Is this where you expected to find yourself when you were a kid in Maryland? If not, where did you think you’d be?

I have memories of being a kid and wanting to work on spaceships: rockets specifically. I thought I would major in “aerospace engineering.” At some point I also thought it would be cool to be a tradesman doing plumbing, electrical, and carpentry type of work.

I took to computers at an early age. In the late 90s and very early 2000s, me and my brother were always tied to my grandmother’s computer. However, I had no idea I would (or could really) work with computers until my high school guidance counselor recommended I take a vocational IT class. There, we learned PC basics, including how to take them apart. That made me think I wanted to work on hardware in some way, and in the years leading up to graduation, I thought I would most likely be a computer repairman.

back then I thought I would hate sitting and staring at a computer all day, “typing.”

After deciding to go to college, that transitioned to this idea of making microchips and circuits (we had learned basic wiring and circuitry in the class). When I did get to college, I took up the “engineering” track of the Computer Science program, and it was that which led me to software development. Ironically, back then I thought I would hate sitting and staring at a computer all day, “typing.” But now, I absolutely love it.

What were the ‘eureka’ moment (or moments) that sparked your journey?

My journey to being a developer started a bit later than some. The first time I ever wrote code was in college!

In all honesty, life just kind of fell together in a lot of ways. In high school when I wanted to be a “tradesman” and didn’t want to go to college, I had a teacher named Ms. Nolan that would tell me (and the rest of the class) “you’re not dreaming big enough” and “you’re going to college and you’re going for free.” I thought she was absolutely crazy.

One day, my guidance counselor told me there was a free spot on a college tour, so I went. The colleges I visited were the only ones I applied to. This is also where I got introduced to my scholarship program - DNIMAS. That was a eureka moment of sorts: Norfolk State University didn’t have a Computer Engineering degree, which was what I’d originally hoped to do. But I wasn’t about to pass up a full ride, so I enrolled as a Computer Science major on the engineering track.

As luck would have it, I thoroughly enjoyed coding and was exceedingly good at it. I remember one day during my first semester: we had just started to really learn to code, and I went back to my dorm room after classes and just began playing with C++ using Dev C++. The more I understood what my code was doing, the more I wanted to write and learn. I was hooked!

This passion got me into some pretty good internships at the Department of Commerce, JP Morgan Chase and IBM. In the end, I took a job from IBM, but I was assigned the most boring role one could ever do: Sharepoint Administration.

The more I understood what my code was doing, the more I wanted to write and learn.

My biggest eureka moment occurred while I was at IBM, when a Google recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and I ended up interviewing there.

It was a total culture shock. The type of things I needed to know for college, DoC, JP, and IBM were worlds away from Silicon Valley. I would compare it to working as a car salesman, then one day stumbling into the car factory assembly line and being expected to know exactly how to put the cars together from scratch. I didn’t get that job at Google, but I learned that there was this whole other side of technology out there and I had to be a part of it.

From that moment, what path did your career take?

I went from thinking “Oh, I have a decent job. If I stay here 5 years, I’ll get promoted” at IBM to thinking, “I need to learn how to be a true coder, how to solve the world’s problems and make the sharepoints, not manage them.”

The first step was to find a job in the Bay area. I applied to a lot of places and didn’t really get much. I ended up falling back to plan Z: switching from IBM to Accenture. It was hilarious, because one of my interviewers even said, “so this is just a business card change for you.” But I moved to the Bay Area with my then girlfriend (now fiancée) and joined Accenture’s SF office, then set out to find a real coding job.

“I need to learn how to be a true coder, how to solve the world’s problems and make the sharepoints, not manage them.”

It was a huge leap of faith. I wasn’t very skilled at the time so I was relatively underpaid, supporting both of us while my fiancée got her Masters degree in Counseling Psychology. Accenture had a wide reach of clients it served and projects one could be placed on and as luck would have it, my Sharepoint hacks done in HTML/CSS/Javascript positioned me to get me contracted on an Apple project (which I actually had to fight for, but that’s another story). Working there as an Accenture contractor isn’t quite the same as working there as an employee, but I still learned a ton. That knowledge allowed me to get into a startup called Yo, which is where I picked up almost all of my backend experience. When that ride ended, I came to Ancestry.

Was there a person, course, or other resource that really helped you along the way? Was your family supportive?

Practice was really my best friend. A lot of what I learned, I taught myself— by trying things and practicing. I have always been curious about how things work. As a small child I would take apart my toys (although they rarely got put back together). Everyone around me was very supportive; most of my teachers (both in high school and in college) saw the potential in me and would do what they could to push me to be as good as I could be.

My family was supportive as well. It was a win-win for them: as I got better and older I became the family tech support guy! All that being said, my biggest resource was probably my scholarship program. I can’t imagine my mom would have been able to afford to send me to college on her own. So without DNIMAS there is a good chance I would have ended up going to community college. I’m sure I still would have made it, but it’s hard to say how much more time it would have taken me.

It was a win-win for [my family]: as I got better and older I became the family tech support guy!

There seems to be a certain pressure on underrepresented folks in this industry to change it from within (while not always being empowered to do so). How do you deal with this?

I feel this pressure as well. I started out by doing things like speaking at my church, going back to NSU and my high school to talk, and tutoring and offering advice to peers and students. I think what I do best (for better or worst) is speaking up about things very loudly. As my fiancé would word it, I “speak [my] truth even if [my] voice shakes.”[1] At work, I’m very outspoken. I’ve developed the type of reputation where people ask me for my opinion when I’m quiet, both because they value it and because it’s unusual for me to not have one.

The hardest part, though, is being consistent and resilient. There are days when I absolutely am ready to quit my job because of the needed change and lack of diversity. However, I always tell myself that if I leave, who will be there to make this change? So I press on and I go to therapy!

[1]Maggie Kuhn

If you could do everything all over again, do you think your journey would be the same? Would you want it to be?

If I could do it all over again, I would probably study harder and try and get directly into a “big name” place like Google. When I first graduated, somehow I just had no idea this world existed, so I would try and do more to get to where I am now faster.

There is, though, a decent chance my journey would have been the same. Because of how life works, I wouldn’t actually want it to be different because of the ripple effects. But speaking in isolation, I definitely wish I could have gotten up to speed faster and thus progressed in my knowledge even more.

Is there anything about the internet or technology that you remember from your childhood/early years that makes you feel nostalgic?

Napster comes to mind. Me, my brother, and another friend of mine use to be really into downloading “stuff.” We didn’t have internet ourselves so we had to perfectly position our computer by the window to “borrow” the neighbor's wifi. Those were the days.

How do you see your next five to ten years? What are you most excited about? Perhaps most afraid of?

In five to ten years, I hope that I’ll look back and think, “man what was I thinking.” I’m all about exponential growth. I flip perspectives very quickly and the goals I have today will likely not be the same in a year.

That being said, ideally I’ll be working on a cause, and less about making money. One of the things I’ve truly come to dislike is capitalism. Most of us work and make money for the sake of survival. I believe that it’s rare to find someone who works where they do solely because of the pure joy they get out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing code, and I do fun stuff at Ancestry— but if I won the lottery, I’d quit that day. But wouldn’t everybody?

The thing that excites me the most right now is crypto-currency and the overall prospect of being able to run my own business - or at least be my own boss. Whether that’s being the CTO of Ancestry, CTO at Sequel, running a Cryptocurrency trading related business, or just having a bot that trades for me while I sit on the beach— I’m not sure.

Thanks so much to Michael for his time and excellent responses! You can find him on LinkedIn.

Also thanks to /dev/color and their speaker form, which has connected me to both Michael and Nick!

[1]Maggie Kuhn

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