HR Trends to Track—What an All-Digital Intern Expects in the Workplace

HR Trends to Track provides a line-up of the latest hacks, new ideas and information you can put to use to help you rock employee engagement and cultivate your rock stars

Welcome to the all-digital, all-the-time workforce. Are you ready?

78 percent of college graduates feel completely prepared for a digital workforce1—and expect one when they land on your doorstep. Compare that to a 2014 study that reported only 44 percent of students felt well prepared or very prepared by their college or university in digital or technical skills.2

What’s more, a study by Accenture finds that the interns and early career employees you’ll meet in 2018 will resemble their Gen X parents much more than their Millennial siblings. Digital natives expect their employers to provide formal training designed and tailored to their unique needs. When Smartphones adapt the user’s experience based on voice, fingerprint, and facial recognition can’t an employer offer a work experience that’s connected, engaging, and personalized?

“New grads are looking for an employee experience that is tailored for them.”

Accenture

Integrating and inspiring your employees begins with their earliest experience. The way new employees “imprint” on your organization can make a huge difference in whether they connect, contribute, and stay with your team or fall through the cracks creating expensive churn in your organization.

Technology That Works at Every Career Stage

Technology is a critical ingredient for every HR leader’s employee engagement strategy. Connection and integration underpinned by tech are central to keeping top performers plugged into your culture. Here are three tech-powered internship and new employee tips to help you boost employee engagement.

  1. Personalize work assignments: Personalized work assignments match employee skills and interests to projects. Let interns choose from a pool of available projects or allocate work to new team members based on their interests, their skill levels, or role-based integration tracks that you define.
  2. Promote real-time, two-way feedback: Everyone thrives on feedback. Collect real-time team input on your employee performance throughout their tenure with you. Think internships are too brief to benefit from tech? We’ve seen teams boost performance and engagement on short and long-term projects. Everyone benefits from timely guidance. Two-way feedback helps employees share their feedback with you as well, keeping communication flowing.
  3. Track skills to power career growth: Create a list of hard and/or soft skills and then empower new employees to track the skills they are acquiring throughout the program. Unleash their potential as they fill in skills gaps with targeted work.

You know interns; we know internship and new employee program management. We believe you have one chance to impress tomorrow’s leaders, so we’ve put technology at your fingertips, and theirs. Our SaaS-based project collaboration experience connects new employees to your team quickly.

Learn more about new employee integration and internship program management. If you’d like more information about preparing for digital natives we’d love to help you. We can walk you through a demo, share customer success stories and case studies, and give you the resources you need to choose the right solution for your organization. We’re ready to help, just visit the vi website for more information or connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

References

Photo credit: Lilly Rum on Unsplash
1 https://www.accenture.com/t20170901T080938Z__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-50/Accenture-Strategy-Workforce-Gen-Z-Rising-POV.pdf
2 http://www.internships.com/eyeoftheintern/uncategorized/infographicdigital-technical-skills-gap/