What are interns looking for?
Interns are seeking opportunities that stimulate their interest in the accountancy profession and provide real-world experience.
Interns are seeking opportunities that stimulate their interest in the accountancy profession and provide real-world experience. For those who had completed an internship, our survey reports that the experience had the greatest influence in helping them reach an informed decision on pursuing a professional accountancy qualification.
A meaningful, purposeful internship will:
- provide challenging projects and tasks
- give interns focused, purposeful roles to keep them motivated
- give them a broad exposure to the organisation
- provide supervision and mentoring
- set clear goals and objectives for the intern to achieve.
WHAT TYPE OF WORK DOES AN INTERN EXPECT?
An essential part of a successful internship is deciding what kinds of work and projects the intern will do. Interns want to be challenged. The main issue identified in unsuccessful internships was the intern not having enough work or appropriately challenging work to keep the intern interested and engaged. In terms of day-to-day work successful internships tend to be structured as follows.
1. Project work: this can be a special analysis or project that will require the intern to use and develop their accountancy skills. This should form the major part of the intern’s work, for example, the intern may assist with a system implementation project.
2. General work: this will be ad hoc work that will give the intern a better understanding of day-to-day operations in your business and in the workplace more generally. It may involve assisting colleagues with routine tasks, which could help give the intern a better understanding of how the company operates.
3. Reactive work: this might involve helping out with non-planned work that needs an urgent response. Dealing with urgent issues is an important part of working life so it can be valuable experience.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WORK EXPERIENCE, INTERNSHIPS AND APPRENTICESHIPS?
Work experience offers an opportunity for individuals to observe and get a feel for working life within a company or organisation. Work experience opportunities normally run for a very short period (normally no longer than two-weeks). Often work experience will involve an individual shadowing and employee to get a better understanding of the work they do, they may be given simple tasks to complete while on work experience but will generally not have full access to internal systems. Work experience opportunities are normally unpaid.
Internships will last for a longer period than work experience opportunities. An intern will be brought in to assist with specific business related tasks. Employers should provide interns with a simple contract, which sets out the terms of their employment. As interns will be delivering a service to the employer they should be paid for the work they do.
Apprenticeships combine practical training in a specific job with study. Apprentices will work alongside experienced staff and gain job-specific skills while studying for a related qualification. Apprenticeships can run from 1 to 4 years depending on their level (which align to different education levels, such as GCSE level or degree level). There will be certain obligations on both employers and apprentices, for example, employers will need to be able to let apprentices attend classes and take study leave. From 2016 there will be an Accountancy Apprenticeship available as part of the Government’s Trailblazers initiative.