About Intern in Michigan

Intern In Michigan is a collaborative, statewide initiative to retain and attract talent through internship opportunities. InternInMichigan.com was designed to be a one-stop portal for our young and talented individuals within and outside the state looking for internships across Michigan. It contains information about not only internship opportunities, but also the high quality of life available in Michigan. The goal of this statewide program is to place 25,000 college students and graduates in Michigan-based internships by 2013.

InternInMichigan.com was developed in partnership with a team of Michigan-based entrepreneurial companies: Digerati, Issue Media Group, and Media Genesis. This innovative team is currently developing the next generation internship matching tool – Classroom to Career – which will be launched in Fall 2010. This new system will offer everything available today with InternInMichigan.com and add additional features and greater capacity to smartly accommodate more users.

Before the launch of this effort, Michigan lacked a single-source for promoting critical job opportunities to young, educated professionals. Until the development of InternInMichigan.com, every university (and its students) individually sought out prospective employers across the state and every prospective employer was forced to navigate a number of placement offices at each of Michigan’s many universities to post jobs. At one large public university alone, there are over 25 placement offices scattered throughout the campus. Conversely, many smaller or lesser known colleges and universities are overlooked by employers who are limited in terms of resources and familiarity. The system has been cumbersome and time-consuming and has resulted in Michigan’s students and employers turning to out-of-state job markets where there is a greater perception of job opportunity.

Intern In Michigan is supported by funding from the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Labor. The initiative is administered by the Detroit Regional Chamber with assistance from its three hub partners, the West Michigan Strategic Alliance, Prima Civitas Foundation, and the Traverse City Chamber of Commerce. The goal is to implement the program across the state, relying on partnerships with key intermediaries such as business associations, hundreds of chambers, and the career and internship offices of Michigan’s colleges and universities.

Background

Michigan is well endowed with a terrific higher education system. At the same time, data and anecdotal evidence of a “brain drain” point to a higher education system from which students are deciding to leave Michigan upon graduation. A survey sponsored jointly by the Southeast Michigan Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) and the Michigan Municipal League, sent to over 33,000 graduates of public universities in 2007, found that 46% had left the state by the spring of 2008. The results were based on the responses of over 5,300 people, 88% of whom were Michigan natives. Clearly, other regions of the country are reaping the rewards of our investment in the education of young people.

A significant number of the college graduates who left Michigan indicated that they had done so because they were unable to find a job in their career area in Michigan, according to the study of recent graduates cited above (54% cited it as one of their top three out of twelve reasons). This rationale, however, is not well-supported because 56 % of those who listed the inability to find a job as a significant reason for leaving also admitted that they had not looked for a job in Michigan. This contradiction suggests that graduates’ perception of a lack of job opportunities in Michigan drives out-migration behavior more than actual experience of inability to find opportunities. If, as the survey indicates, large numbers of college graduates claim to be leaving the state in search of employment, there seems to be an opportunity to keep them here if they could be connected more effectively to entry level, career track internships. For example, Philadelphia has experienced retention of 64% of college graduates through use of internships.

Are there jobs for these young people? Despite our difficult economic climate, there is reason to believe that there are positions available. According to a monthly survey conducted by the Southeast Michigan Community Alliance (SEMCA), anywhere from 9,000 -15,000 jobs are posted online each month in Southeast Michigan. Judging by the job titles and industry sectors they’re in, many if not most of these positions appear to be professional in nature and require a degree (this survey data also provides us with the names of employers postings the positions which will obviously be helpful in getting placements). Data supplied by the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor, and Economic Growth (DELEG) projects an annual demand for 30,000 college educated adults in the State through 2014.

The Case for an Internship System

Several facts are very clear. First, the availability of an educated workforce is a critical component of economic development in a knowledge economy. Secondly, compared to more economically prosperous regions, we have a shortage of educated talent in the region and the state. Thirdly, roughly half of the Michigan residents who do earn a degree end up leaving the state.

Retaining our own college graduates would be far easier than attracting them from somewhere else. Our own survey of recent college graduates indicates that a variety of factors influence individual location decisions, and Michigan needs to work on all of them. However, we believe that connecting young people to internships that have a reasonable chance of turning into permanent jobs on a large scale has more promise for retaining young people than any other single thing we can do. Being in a position to offer employers quick and easy access to interns from virtually any college and university in the state would provide Michigan with a distinct competitive advantage in attracting and retaining employers as well.

Do internships increase the odds that students will stay in a given area or are they likely to lead to permanent job offers? According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the percent of interns converted to full time employment rose form 35.6% in 2001 to 50.5% in 2008.