“It’s going to be tough for some companies,” said Matthew Hora, director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin. “Converting to working remotely requires quite a bit of forethought as to how to design meaningful tasks and how to supervise them in a productive way.
“It’s an opportunity for us to build a talent pipeline,” said Richardson, the company's enterprise talent manager. “We do expect some of our interns to become employees and we want to give them a running start at that.”“This year, more than 4,000 students had plans to join us – the largest and most diverse class in our history – taking on roles spanning all our functions,” wrote Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief people officer in a recent blog post.
In contrast, managers at financial services companies that have previously balked at remote work have recognized the opportunity to create positive experiences for their interns. They, along with so many other companies also see the risk associated with not responding. That’s the way virtual internships should be organized anyway, he said. Instead of one large project, interns can get involved in a variety of well-defined and discreet tasks, often in different divisions of a company. Even though they might be assigned to marketing, they might see an opportunity in sales, which is a lot like what happens when students are onsite for the summer.
"The really cool thing is that I don't get treated like a student," Kahtava said."The companies are open to my opinions and thoughts. They want to know what I think they should do with the projects."Kahtava said his most recent internship with a trucking company – building a database to capture capital and operating expenses and other data assignments – got extended in February.