TM - April 2008 - (Page 47) the grand opening of a shopping mall in Arizona and participated in various training sessions on media relations. “They were great about treating all of the interns as employees,” Williams said. “I mean, I answered to ‘intern,’ but I felt like I was just as valuable as the part-time or full-time people.” The company also provided opportunities for all of the interns to meet with top-level executives to ask questions and learn more about the company, as well as get together with each other and socialize regularly. “I liked getting to know everyone in this group and really forming some great relationships with the people [at GGP],” Williams said. “It made me really feel connected to the company.” By the time her internship was nearing an end, Williams said she knew she wanted to return full time. With one semester to go, she kept in touch regularly with her contacts at GGP . “Organizations that fail to hire interns today are going to find it very difficult to hire highly qualified recent grads.” “We would all e-mail back and forth, even if it was just forwards or silly e-mails,” she said. “In that frustrating time of graduation when you have no plans, it was very encouraging because I had grown this relationship with this company, and it was the only place I wanted to be.” Now an account representative for GGP’s con– Steven Rothberg sumer intelligence marketing group, Williams works side-by-side with Nicole Spreck and other former Prodigies interns who also have returned to work for GGP full time. Williams’ chance encounter on a Midwestern flight two years ago was lucky, but her resulting internship experience was no accident. Everything — from the initial (albeit unintentional) grassroots networking to the hands-on experience to the buy-in from top management — represents a critical element of a successful internship program in today’s marketplace, said Steven Rothberg, founder of CollegeRecruiter.com. “As baby boomers continue to retire and the number of those retirees grows, it’s going to leave a bit of a vacuum in the middle- to upper-management ranks,” Rothberg explained. “There are far too few Gen Xers to fill that vacuum, so those leaders are going to have to come from Gen Y. Organizations that fail to hire interns today are going to find it very difficult to hire highly qualified recent grads, and if they can’t do that, then they’re not going to have those Gen Y employees to fill that management vacuum.” As a result, more and more organizations are beginning to look at internship programs as integral parts of their succession planning strategies. For example, Pam Webster, corporate recruiting manager for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, said Enterprise deliberately hires up to 2,000 interns every year. http://CollegeRecruiter.com http://TheTrainingAssociates.com
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