Summer is traditionally “intern season” in the USA. This year, I’m running a session of mine outside the office
By Keil Hubert
What does an “internship” look like when it takes place totally outside of corpo containment? I don’t know yet, but that’s my goal for this summer: to turn my conventional and proven white-collar internship programme into a viable variant that’s untethered from the usual cubicle farm.
For context, I used to be an Air Force unit commander in the reserve components. Back then, I had two Chief Master Sergeants (E9) and two Senior Master Sergeants (E8) to mentor. I was appalled by how little my four leaders had learned in their Professional Military Education (PME) courses. They were all technically proficient, but their understanding of organisational behaviour and mentoring was sadly lacking. That skill gap made it unnecessarily difficult when they attempted to carry out my reforms.
I decided to address the problem in-house. I designed my own Senior Non-Commissioned Officer Professional Development programme. By that, I mean I selected a stack of books, white papers, and articles for their ability to explain key concepts and prompt discussion. They I drew a through-line from concept to concept so the lessons all tied together. Each drill weekend, after the unit was dismissed, the SRNCOs would gather in my office. We’d drink a toast to the unit, and thereafter all military rules on decorum were suspended. We could “cuss and discuss” the assigned content until everyone understood the key learning objectives.
I ran my SRNCOPD programme for four years, up until I retired from the military and returned to corpo space. My new civilian supervisor was one of my former SRNCOs (he’d retired a year before I did). My retired Chief wanted to professionalise his rapidly expanding team, so we reengineered my old military professional development program into a new corpo version. Couldn’t include the opening toast anymore, but the interactive seminar discussions remained.
‘Wait, I thought Human Resources was there to protect the workers, not to protect the employer from the workers!”
A few years later, I took a new, non-supervisory gig in a different company. One day, out of the blue, our executive asked if any shops would be interested in taking on a summer intern. I volunteered immediately and begged to get one for our shop. Unlike the other groups in our department, I wasn’t interested in using an intern for production work. Instead, I wanted to give my interns a rocket-powered competitive advantage in their working lives.
I used the months between my summer intern’s approval and their arrival to retool my military and corpo professional development programmes into a single, streamlined, high-intensity hybrid curriculum with four parallel tracks:
The Individual Behaviour Track explored cognitive science, psychology, and decision-making. It sought to answer why people do stupid things at work with an eye towards how inspire better behaviour.
The Organisational Behaviour Track focused on how behaviour in groups can be understood, influenced, and changed. It leaned heavily into policy, practice, communication, and feedback.
Especially poorly conceived and clumsily written policies that remain in effect while going unenforced.
The Theory Track studied how business culture has evolved into the mess we endure today. What traditions, assumptions, and structural changes across the past century have brought about the Kafkaesque purgatory that is the average modern cubicle farm?
The Production Track, finally, focused on the tools, techniques, and best practices employed to create meaningful, lasting change at both the individual and organisational echelons.
My new four-track Intern Professional Development (IPD) programme was a smash success. It was also a blast to teach. It’s been a thrill to watch our interns go on to score much better jobs than us old dudes had managed to after finishing university. We were able to impart a decade’s worth of painful lessons-learned in the 12-13 weeks we had them on the team.
Now it’s ten years later and I’m back on the bench thanks to another “restructuring.” I’ve missed getting to mentor folks, so I volunteered to lecture on cyber careers at our local high school this past Spring. I mentioned my IPD programme during my lectures and was contacted by a teacher afterwards about holding a session of it this summer for young folks who wanted an internship but hadn’t secured an offer. I said, “HECK, YEAH!” and got to work planning.
I might have cackled in glee like a mad scientist a few times. I enjoy this stuff.
It’s been a challenge condensing my established corpo version of IPD down to something that can be completed in the painfully short American summer recess. We’ve worked out a plan for 20 seminar sessions of 2-2.5 hours each. My new summer intern – and the teacher who hosted my guest lectures! – are meeting every other day until mid-July. Then they’ll take their respective family vacations. We’ll resume our intense training cycle when they get back so that they’ll “graduate” my IPD before the new school year starts in August.
I’ve had to cut the entire Production Track, both for time and because there’ was no way to make it happen without corpo IT resources (like an LMS). I’ve also had to change how I used to teach the Theory and OB Tracks because neither of my students have ever held a corpo gig before. This is IPD on “hard mode.”
Still, it’s been a blast. We’re 20 per cent through the syllabus and we’re still gaining steam with every session. It’s deeply satisfying to watch my interns’ moments of epiphany as myriad concepts suddenly click together and reveal a new lens for understanding their world. Sure, it’s rough trying to replicate an experience that really needs the corpo environment to function properly, but we’ll make this work.
All of this started two decades ago when I got fed up with the underwhelming senior leaders that my organisation was giving me. I believed in the adage “if the system isn’t giving you the resources you need to succeed, create those resources yourself.” Now, years and iterations later, I’m inculcating that that same adapt and overcome spirit in a new generation of leaders. Look out for them in a year or so. I promise they’ll be your most competitive applicants.
