Finding Time For Interns
I often hear people say they don't have enough time to work with an intern. I think this is a shame. As someone who has benefited from internships, I believe they're essential to professional development, and it makes me sad that many companies are pulling back on internships because they're less focused on preparing the next generation of leaders in their profession.
Long-term Commitment to Internship
At Your Path, we strive to do our part. For over 5 years, Your Path Counseling Center has hosted therapy interns. We have benefited greatly from our interns over the years.
In addition to internships, we work with Dr. Berina to give students real projects to work on during the project management course she offers during the fall semester. Last year we partnered with the Edge Career Center to offer a workshop on reducing Job Search Stress to help raise awareness of the Career Counseling Services we offer. Students helped plan, organize, and promote the event. Cathy Rollman from the Edge Center shared that it was one of the best-attended events the career center held last year, short of Bootcamp and Job Fairs. It was a true win-win; the students got the opportunity to work with a real company on a real project, and we gained a better understanding of what it takes to host a successful workshop on a college campus.
Creating win-win opportunities for learning
This year, students will research ways for us to begin to offer products through our website. As a rule of thumb, when a service business wants to generate additional income, one of the best ways is to sell products that align with your service offerings. I don't want to give our plan away, but for context, we specialize in expressive therapy and have started offering trainings on different therapeutic modalities. Our goal is to make it easier for individuals who have attended one of our workshops to start offering that modality in their practice.
This past week, the students visited our Railroad location to learn more about our practice, mental health in general, and how we differentiate ourselves. They met first with our CEO and heard directly from her what she would like to see from the project. For us, this is a low-stakes project with significant upside. If the idea works, we'll have additional revenue to support our efforts to expand mental health accessibility in Central Virginia. If it doesn’t work, we'll at least have given students real-world experience, and I can use that to support business clients.
Productising a service is one of the most effective ways to build a more scalable, valuable and saleable business, precisely because it creates the recurring, transferable revenue that buyers reward. Click here to learn more. How to Productise a Service Business: 8 Steps | Exit Advisory Group
Using technology to find time and efficiency
In addition to providing education opportunities for students, I use projects like this for my own professional growth. I currently use meeting transcripts for virtual meetings, but I haven't used them during in-person meetings. I used the note taker in Notion this past week, and was pleased with the quality of the recap it provided. Meetings always involve a lot of information. It can be challenging to document everything, and trying to do so can also restrict your ability to focus and engage in the meeting. I am a pen-and-paper person, so I'll keep taking my own notes, but I like the extra assistance and the synthesized notes the tool provided to help capture what I might have missed or offer a different perspective.
My suggestion: Identify a situation this week where you can test a new technology that could help improve your efficiency.
Even reducing your workload by 1 hour may create space to take on a rewarding project, like offering an internship to students, which, in the long term, benefits you and the students you have the opportunity to work with. Finding time can be the most rewarding thing you do this week.
Interested in offering an internship in Central Virginia? Start here:
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