By: James Brockway jbrockway @ brockwaycommercial. com
Brockway Commercial
For several years Brockway Realty has brought on interns, primarily from San Jacinto College. Typically these interns have been individuals wanting to pursue a real estate career and some permanently came on board our company. The past year we started a program with Odyssey Academy, a charter school, where we would take a senior of theirs and teach them the basics of how businesses operate. While the San Jacinto students were focused primarily on real estate activities and personal growth in the industry, our focus with the Odyssey Academy students was to provide them with a basic understanding of working at and running a business.
Taking on interns can be rewarding to both the intern and the company when done properly but consider the following:
• Set reasonable expectations. Remember, in many cases, these students have had little to no experience in a business environment so what might be old hat to you could be a very foreign concept to them.
• Set goals and measure their progress.
• Enforce a dress code that’ s representative of your company. It’ s one thing to teach an intern about business, but how to look and feel like a businessperson is important as well.
• Determine what the pay will be, if any. In some cases, the student might get classroom credit hours and there is no request for compensation. In other cases, especially with college level students, the pay is a significant issue because it helps them pay for their college and other expenses.
• Determine if you will allow the student to work from home and just show up periodically for face to face updates.
• Will you give the Intern a company email account?
• Will you give the Intern business cards? A recent high school intern thought it was so cool that he was greeted at the company with his own business cards!
• Have an exit interview with the student when their internship ends. Make sure to ask them what you could do to improve the internship program for the future. I was surprised when my most recent intern told me that he was surprised that I didn’ t enforce a dress code. I just assumed as a high school student he did not have a big budget for business clothing but on the other hand were T- shirts and jeans appropriate?
Above all, make sure you have the time to create a program for the student and can regularly meet with them. For it to be successful, interns are going to need a lot of guidance from you. If the internship is one that is general in nature and not project related, give the intern every sort of task no matter how mundane. Teach them how to make coffee, how to make copies, give them your office lease to read, give them your corporate bylaws to read, then give them bite size projects like entering business cards into Outlook, preparing a basic Excel schedule and preparing a Word document on company letterhead. The point of all this is for them to become well-rounded and get a taste of everything in a business setting whether it be administrative, technological, data entry, etc. Remember, you could be shaping the next business leaders!
19 MOMENTUM / Summer 2018