June was a big Talent month at Pollenizer. We were ramping up the Academy, scouting new team members, wrapping up the Autumn Term, and saying goodbye to our wonderful Andy Coffey who will shortly be off on adventures in the US. In between all of that craziness, Pollenizer pushed play on the Internship Programme.

The initiative was not without its hiccups, but like with everything here, we went on with it and hoped for the most #flearnings. The very concept of interns seemed to be very divisive within the team. As much as we were excited about opening up the Hive to “new blood” and get an injection of energy in, it was hard not to worry about the distraction and added workload that would entail.

To be perfectly honest, I was personally a little apprehensive about rolling forward with it. Between the obscure changes of workplace legislation, the potential disruption for the current staff, and the added workload of managing new staff – the pay off didn’t seem to be there. So we decided to get educated on the process. What exactly was an internship? What did we need to get it going? What documentation would we need? What do the students get out of it? What are the risks involved for a business like Pollenizer?

I had spent close to six hours with FairWork on the phone, countless more researching different government sites and talking to industry experts, and no one seemed to have a straight answer on what an internship was and what was the best way to do it. We found that there are two fundamental problems with it. The first is that there is no ONE source of truth for internships in Australia – either to define them nor to regulate them. Internships go under the purview of many different private entities and governmental institutions – FairWork, the Department of Education, each individual university or TAFE, individual internship gateways for student placements… the list was endless and no one seemed to be on the same page. Also, many of the policies were overlapping and even outdated. This was beginning to look like a little nightmare.

The second problem was that, even with the lack of an ‘official” definition, what people THINK an internship is, and what it ACTUALLY is, are two very different things. I was thrown by this one, too. The layman’s concept of an internship is closer to volunteer work – an individual offering their services free of charge in lieu of work experience or a “foot in the door.” This is very common in the US and in many Latin American countries – it’s also been the subject of many movies and TV shows so it’s no wonder this idea is so pervasive in our collective culture.

The problem is that an internship, as it seems to exist under Australian regulations, is strictly defined within the education space as an undertaking with a university or a tertiary education institution. Simply put, in order for you to be a legitimate intern, you have to currently be a student and the work you would be performing would fall under a course requirement for your degree. The idea is that individuals should not undertake internships directly with companies, probably so that students are protected from overwork or abuse by the education institution. That made a lot of sense, but it made the timing and selection process very tricky to match up with what we needed.

At the end we decided to take a Pollenizer Way approach to it and come up with an Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the Internship Programme. What would a Minimum Viable Internship (MVI) look like?

We decided to pick one university to work with and test what the operational implications of an internship would be. We went ahead and took some meetings with the University of Sydney and we soon had a shortlist of candidates. After some quick vetting and a few agreements back and forth, on June 18th, Pollenizer’s Internship Programme was officially open for business.

We are two weeks into the exercise now and the results have been equally surprising and rewarding. The MVP as it stands now includes three very bright and eager-to-learn young men: Gabriel Fattal (Talent & HR), Alvin Valdez (Lean Product Management) and John Bromhead (Business Development). They will be with us for six weeks and try to sponge up as much of Pollenizer as they can.

In the short time they have been here, they have all hit the ground running and absorbed the Pollenizer Way. They will be sharing their #learnings and #flearnings with a series of blogposts – the first round coming right after this one! I’m very excited to see what happens in the next four weeks and to see that before-and-after over the next month and a half. Please join me in  welcoming the three of them and follow their Pollenizer journey throughout July!

With that, I’ll leave you with the first round of Gabriel and Alvin. Enjoy.