Student intern certification program gets green light

According to a 2022 Zippia study, a majority of students (53%) who successfully complete a college internship receive a job offer after graduation. In UIT, many of these interns are promoted to full-time jobs within the organization.

When it comes to gaining industry-relevant skills, it’s hard to deny the value of pre-professional college work experiences. While UIT’s award-winning student employment programs strive to build foundational and technical skills to prepare students heading into the workforce, a lack of formal training documentation was an area a student intern in University Support Services (USS) singled out for improvement during a recent student employee summit.

Anticipating this need, a working group led by Doug Kenner, associate director for the USS HR/Auxiliary Team, was formed in March to begin building out an online certification program for UIT student interns.

“This will really help to answer first day questions for student interns in a more organized and consistent manner,” said Erin Otterstrom, a senior data governance analyst in USS.

The Canvas-hosted course, scheduled to launch in October, comprises three modules. The first two — general competency training and core competency training — pertain to students in any IT role. “All our groups and departmental needs are able to fit inside that training structure,” said Monty Kaufusi, manager for the Student University Development Opportunity (SUDO) program and UIT Service Monitoring Group. The third module in development, role-based competency training, will vary based on a student employee’s department.

“We’ve been working to improve the overall student intern experience in UIT over the past year,” said Jason Moeller, director of USS Engineering. “This certification program is part of these efforts.”

Kaufusi said the program “provides good cross functional awareness” and “will better set expectations and help our interns get qualified and ready to roll.”

“They’ll know what they need to learn, how they’re going to learn it, who’s supporting them while they’re learning it, and that structure will always be there,” he said.

The general certification course roadmap is as follows:

Module 1: General competency training (week 1)

• General information
• Virtual private network (VPN) setup
• Communication skills
• Equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace
• Time management and personal productivity
• Professional interpersonal skills
• Jira work management software
• Wiki hypertext publication
• Microsoft Teams
• ServiceNow
• UKG (Kronos) time and attendance platform
• Planview portfolio management platform

Module 2: Core competency training (weeks 2-3)

• Information security
• Identity & Access Management (IAM)
• Software development life cycle (SDLC)
• Project management
• User experience/user interface (UX/UI)
• IT frameworks
• Data visualization (business intelligence tools, metrics, and reporting)
• Windows and Linux operating systems
• Service management: Ticketing and escalation flows
• Enterprise architecture

Module 3: Specific role competency training (in development)

 “I think the role-specific competency module will be especially helpful. By teaching specifics of individual positions, they’ll be more ready to take on projects right away,” Otterstrom said, noting that links to important IT-related university policies will also be provided.

The modules, Kenner said, will leverage a variety of resources, including Human Resources onboarding materials, Udemy for Business courses, and curated playlists of YouTube videos.

In addition to making graduating interns more appealing to prospective employers by teaching them industry-relevant skills, Dan Thornley, associate director of USS Quality Assurance, said that the certification program also “lays things out in a more consistent and standardized way.”

Barb Iannucci, associate director of USS Content Management & Usability, agreed, adding, “everyone wins by being more organized and more prepared.”

Kenner said there have also been high-level discussions, once the student certification program is underway and more thoroughly pilot-tested, of extending something similar to full-time, non-student UIT staff members.

“It’s something we’re looking at, whether we can use this program as a training template for our other UIT employees,” he said. “Can we create a career progression for them so that they can continue to grow and be promoted?”

 

Node 4 Search