About Intern in Michigan

The goal of Intern in Michigan is to keep Michigan’s college grads in Michigan and to connect Michigan’s businesses to young Michigan talent. Intern in Michigan is a statewide, coordinated effort engaging key partners including the Detroit Regional Chamber, West Michigan Strategic Alliance, Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan, Mid-Michigan Innovation Team, and a grant from Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development.

The goal of this statewide system is to place 25,000 Michigan college students in Michigan-based internships by year five of the project. The program will rely on partnerships with key intermediaries such as business associations, hundreds of chambers, and the career and internship offices of Michigan’s colleges and universities. The InternInMichigan.com site is being developed in partnership with a team of Michigan-based entrepreneurial companies: Digerati, Issue Media Group, and MediaGenesis.

Before the launch of this effort, Michigan lacked a single-source for promoting critical job opportunities to Michigan-educated young 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. 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.

For decades, individual colleges and businesses have been going it alone to respond to this statewide need. In this highly-mobile society and economy, it no longer makes good business sense for a college to limit itself to one region to locate jobs for its students. Businesses have learned that they can attract talent for their positions from across the world – not just from their own backyard. In order to retain Michigan’s talented college graduates, Michigan must find a better way to connect its talented college graduates with Michigan job opportunities. InternInMichigan.com recognizes this changing landscape and recognizes that we can’t do the same thing to achieve something different. As a result, this website is the first step in taking advantage of Web 2.0 tools and leadership to locate internships for a Web 2.0 generation. Over the next 2-3 years, InternInMichigan.com will evolve into a single-source, statewide internship system to expose Michigan students to Michigan jobs and to retain Michigan’s college graduates for the future.

With the release of this first phase of the InternInMichigan.com website, the basic platform for internship matching is in place. This will be used as the foundation of the statewide system as the InternInMichigan.com site is developed further. In this foundation phase, students will be able to post resumes, search for internships, and access lifestyle resources in communities where opportunities are offered. Prospective employers will be able to post job openings, view resumes, and access resources about the benefits and challenges of providing a good internship experience.

Background

Michigan is well endowed with a terrific higher education system. Detroit lies within 90 miles of three outstanding research universities which have recently formed a research university corridor to better coordinate their activities. At the same time, data and anecdotal evidence of a “brain drain” point to an excellent higher education system whose students are deciding to leave Michigan upon graduation. A survey sponsored jointly by the S.E. Michigan WIRED (Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development) 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 our young people.

Our situation is not unique in that respect. According to Richard Florida’s research in Rise of the Creative Class, 90% of the metropolitan regions in the country export educated talent to the 10% of the regions that are attracting it. Given Detroit’s current lack of high density, walk able, 24/7 neighborhoods served by convenient mass transit that has attracted educated talent to other cities, our region will probably have to look for alternative means of securing educated young people. Given the fact that about half of Michigan residents who graduate with a four year degree are leaving the State, any strategy that reduced that number would start to improve the percentage of adults in the region with a college degree.

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). However, 56 % of those listed the inability to find a job as a significant reason for leaving also admitted that they hadn’t even looked for a job here! 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 jobs. As a comparison, Philadelphia has experienced a 64% retention 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. As our own survey of recent college graduates indicate that a variety of factors influence individual location decisions and the State 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.