Engineering internship - checklists, templates

An internship is one of the great sources of talent for your organization. This is especially important when you need to compete for qualified employees. The tech talent shortage is already a fact and can reach about 4 million unfilled positions by 2030 (source: Global Talent Crunch report).

Here are the benefits of running engineering internship programs:

• Grow your future employees. Train people to become professional software engineers who will stay with you after a program ends. Even though they are juniors, they’ll have domain knowledge, understand the product better and know the organization’s culture.

• Stretch your current team. Engineers will need to learn how to transfer their knowledge to less skilled peers. They will improve their interview skills too.

• Stretch your tech stack.  Interns will test your tech stack and SDLC processes. You will see how easily a low-skilled person can contribute to a project. Or how easy it is to break things — will SDLC catch mistakes and bugs before they reach production?

• Become a better leader. Leading people at the beginning of their careers is challenging. Very often, these people need to learn more than just technical skills. They need to know how to work with the team, communicate effectively, what’s the difference between delivering value vs. delivering code, and how to acknowledge and work with feedback.

You can read more about my experiences with an internship in the blog post.

Here I have prepared the materials to help you plan and run the engineering internship program.

You will get the following:

• Internship planning checklist

• Email templates

• Example template for coding task

• 1:1 template

• Goals planning template