At various events focused on university recruiting and early talent development, we’ve heard many program leaders ask each other what metrics they track to evaluate the success of their internship programs. Clear and consistent data measured over time is crucial to understanding the health of your program and where you need to focus on improving.
Symba is building a workbook, Key Metrics to Optimize & Scale Your Internship Program, to help internship program leaders figure out what metrics they need to track based on their goals. This workbook will be sectioned into four chapters, each covering a different goal:
- Exceptional Experience
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- Recruiting ROI and Conversion to Full-Time
- Brand Awareness
Each chapter will also contain sample surveys and/or spreadsheets you can use to collect the data needed to measure each goal.
Let’s start with Chapter One. This chapter will cover measuring how satisfied your program participants are with your internship program. Are they having exceptional experiences?
One of your most basic but important goals should be understanding your interns’ overall satisfaction with the program you’ve built. Measuring program satisfaction will help you know when and where to course-correct so that you can continuously optimize your program and provide great experiences for your interns. In turn, you should also measure your intern managers' program satisfaction.
So how do you measure exceptional experience? You’ll want to send out regular surveys with an NPS question (would they recommend your internship program) and other questions that ask about your program participants' experiences. Then, compare these survey results over time. Make sure you survey interns as well as managers and other key program participants.
View Chapter One here (no form fill necessary!) for a more detailed description of the goal, the metric, and a sample survey you can use as well as recommendations for successfully measuring exception experience.
Update: We've released all four chapters! You can download the complete workbook here.
