WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT AND DIVERSITY
What are the benefits of interns and why do companies hire them?
Companies of all sizes and industries hire interns to gain valuable support for the business and its existing employees.
Internships allow companies to invest in their own future success and perhaps discover new talent and future leaders.
Interns can take on lower-level tasks, freeing up time for colleagues to handle other work, though more internships now offer responsibilities that go beyond administrative duties.
Companies can select and develop future talent through internships and increase their staff retention rates, since many interns secure job offers after their internship ends.
Former interns assimilate into the new role faster than an external hire might.
Employers can hold various social activities and professional development seminars to learn more about each intern and how they may be a good permanent addition to the team.
What is our aspiration?
Enterprise Systems will recruit and hire a more diverse workforce and provide opportunities for all employees to expand their skills by providing leadership and job growth opportunities.
Why is this important?
There is no question that our people are our most valuable assets. We collectively develop, implement, support, and manage the systems that run a $4.1 billion institution of higher education. And we do it well.
As we look to the future, we must take intentional steps to increase the diversity of our workforce. A more diverse workforce in both staff and leadership roles will bring new perspectives and provide for innovation. The more demographically and cognitively diverse our workforce, the more creative and productive we are likely to be.
We must also be prepared as the tools, technologies, and processes around us change. That means providing our staff with the opportunity to continually expand our skills so we can be successful.
What are our concrete goals?
- Deploy strategies to increase and monitor the diversity of our job candidate pools.
- Create meaningful and rewarding internship opportunities for IU students to create a diverse talent pipeline.
- Create opportunities to engage managers, emerging leaders, and staff to expand skills and retain talent.
What specific targets are we setting for ourselves for 2023?
- Deploy strategies to increase and monitor the diversity of our job candidate pools.
- Provide diversity-related training for all managers.
- Require dispositioning of candidates (status updates) throughout the hiring process in Talent Acquisition Manager (TAM).
- Monitor candidate pool diversity over time against workforce diversity, using new dashboard.
- Create meaningful and rewarding internship opportunities for IU students to create a diverse talent pipeline.
- Continue student intern task force to provide guidance and best practices to managers on recruiting, hiring, and mentoring interns and to develop a plan to make this program sustainable.
- Launch a student intern showcase, sharing what they have worked on during their time in ES.
- Explore and document paths for interns into the UITS workforce.
- Create opportunities to engage managers, emerging leaders, and staff to expand skills and retain talent.
- Establish town hall or similar report-out opportunities for leadership, staff, and task forces.
- Revitalize communities of practice by promoting participation and highlighting successes in our leadership forums.
- ES managers will develop intentional opportunities for engagement at the ES team level and share approaches at the ES Managers meetings.