Whenever Ben Clark, CEO of Ann Clark Cookie Cutters, discovers that an acquaintance has children in college, he always asks what they’re studying.
“I’m asking partly because I’m curious, but partly because I’m wondering if there’s a potential internship,” said Clark, who employs 120 people at his family’s factory in Rutland. Interns have worked summers at Ann Clark for the last four or five years, and Clark said he’s found all of them through family and friends.
Clark sees internships as a way to find employees, and as a way to show people who live outside Vermont that there are manufacturing jobs available in an area better known for skiing and mountain biking. In a state with 2.1% unemployment, he said, bringing in more potential workers helps everyone.
“If we want to continue to make the community better generationally, we need to get top people coming here,” he said. “So let’s get smart people to come here and work and get experience. The rest will happen naturally … or has a shot at happening naturally.”
When it comes to using interns, Vermont companies are far behind their peers in other states, according to the Vermont Futures Project, a program of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce that was formed in 2016 to tackle economic problems, including the worker shortage.
The Vermont Futures Project came out with a report this spring on how employers can use internships as a way to engage and retain students as workers after they graduate from college. The group’s research found that internships are numerous in Vermont, but that Vermont companies fall far below the national average when it comes to converting interns to employees later on.
A focus of the project’s work is helping companies see internships as recruitment tools. Right now, Vermont companies are offering jobs to interns at about half the rate of the national average among comparable companies, said Bill Shouldice, the CEO of Vermont Teddy Bear in Shelburne and chairman of the project’s board.
Shouldice said Vermont companies don’t do enough to let young people know that internships are available. And when they do offer internships, they often don’t realize they should be giving interns paid, substantive work so both intern and company can see if the intern’s a fit for a job later on, he said.
“You don’t offer them as your civic duty as an employer; you should be offering internships because you are using it as your training ground for your next new hire,” Shouldice said. “You should be thinking about it as a recruitment tool.”
Shouldice thinks a healthy proportion of interns is 5% of the full-time staff. That means Vermont Teddy Bear should have six interns this summer. Right now, it doesn’t have any, he acknowledged.
“My team has not been trained to know how to responsibly recruit and place interns so that they are doing meaningful work,” he said. “We do offer summer jobs, but that’s not what we are talking about here.”
With a healthy supply of colleges in the state, Vermont doesn’t lack potential interns.
“It isn’t a supply problem,” said Lori Smith, the group’s interim executive director. “Most students need an internship to graduate.”
The problem is that in Vermont, internships don’t tend to turn into jobs, said Smith. The project is now talking to employers and finding out why. The group’s board is also talking about creating a place where Vermont employers and interns can find each other.
About 90% of the students at Champlain College complete internships, and some of them complete several, said Tanja Hinterstoisser, director of the career collaborative at Champlain College.
Hinterstoisser said many students take internships out of state because the pay is higher.
“We’re really focusing on developing partnerships with our organizations to help people understand how much of a contributing factor interns are,” she said. “Being able to shape the role of an intern is going to lead to a great benefit for them.”
The Vermont Futures Project has five recommendations aimed at helping the state reach the goal that the project has established of attracting 10,000 more workers to Vermont each year:
• Encourage the state to work on attracting industries that demand college degrees;
• Create a way for graduates to stay in touch with internship employers for future job openings;
• Create a single source advertising job openings that require a college degree;
• Support college graduates who are employed in Vermont through young professional organizations, social organizations, and opportunities for continuous education and training; and
• Encourage Vermont colleges to stay in touch with recent graduates and alumni regularly through their social and print media campaigns.
The survey found that many employers said they didn’t know how to offer internships, and hadn’t thought about internships as a way to find workers, said Shouldice. That includes his own company, he said.
“I personally don’t think we’re doing a good job connecting with the campuses and their continuing education and their career placement programs,” he said. “We have to build a stronger bond there.”
Ann Clark hasn’t hired any of its interns over the last few years, except in the case of an engineering student who now provides part-time consulting services from Wyoming, where he is a professor.
Clark thinks he’s fighting a perception problem.
“When say we have cookie cutter company in Vermont, they think we’re making cookie cutters in a barn with our brothers Darryl and Darryl,” he said. “Whereas if we had a marketing person, they’d say, ‘Come in and you’ll learn more about Amazon than you would ever imagine you’d know.’”
