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Design Interns – It’s not about the coffee…

 

Why hiring design interns can benefit your organisation.

There are several benefits to hiring a design intern in your organisation. Forget about the pair of extra hands during projects, and the occasional cup of coffee – it gives your employees a chance to teach another person their individual skills and what they have learned in the industry. Not to mention the added benefit of refreshing that knowledge for themselves. Having an intern will also add value to your creative and social environment.

Creatively – A fresh pair of eyes, with new opinions, different skills and experiences, provides another outlook on projects and ideas that the team might not have thought of. Choosing an intern with a varied and unexpected portfolio, featuring interesting work you haven’t seen before, can be valuable and inspirational for the rest of the team.

On the social side, the team in which the intern will be part of will gain a feeling of renewal and excitement. Adding a new person to engage with makes the ‘every day’ more interesting. Having an intern that is sociable and confident instantly boosts the team.

When a student is faced with the industry for the first time it’s all very new and exciting and they will instantly infect the rest of the team with their enthusiasm. This will remind the team how it felt in the beginning, working with graphic design. A bit like showing a tourist around your town and they ‘oooh’ and ‘wow’ and you think ‘yeah, it’s pretty awesome here, isn’t it?’ Working with your passion should always trigger excitement, but it can be forgotten in the day to day life.

Picking the right design intern is the key to making the internship period beneficial for the company as well as the intern’s growth. Wonderstuff uses several methods to select interns, and we do it with great care to make sure it will be an experience both the intern and we will emerge from greater than when we started. We often ask candidates to take a simple personality test to determine how they look upon themselves and if they would get along with the rest of the team. Firing some unexpected questions that catch them off guard will also tell us if the intern is confident and quick thinking when a situation shifts. This works as a preparation for what to expect from the industry as well as working in a busy environment with clients and alongside our team.

We have had the pleasure of greeting several interns to our team, who have been involved in what we do here at Wonderstuff. Asking questions, coming in early to help and eager to be part of projects we work on. The more they get involved and the more they ask – the more they will learn and benefit from the internship.

Hiring design interns gives us as an industry a chance to help someone else succeed and be a part of their development. Not only does it give the intern work experience – it opens up future career opportunities and the chance to do some good networking. There are hundreds of students applying for internships all over the UK, and if you want some tips on what makes a great intern, read our article Talking to Newcastle College’s Young Creatives written by Karl Bell.

So the next time you consider hiring an intern, ask yourself this question:

“Will they add value to our organisation creatively, socially and enthusiastically?”