July 2008
Plugging Ohio’s brain drain with summer interns
By Cindy Illig-Lum

Ryan Conatti of Mentor, a student at Mount Union College in Alliance, has been a summer intern at Meister Media in Willoughby for the past two summers. He is returning for the third summer because the company is local and offers a paid position.

In its March report on the Condition of Higher Education in Ohio: Meeting the State’s Future Needs, the Ohio Board of Regents wrote that Ohio produces more bachelor’s degrees per capita than the national average. However, like several other states, more college graduates leave Ohio than migrate in, a total of 9,000 for the one-year period from 2004 to 2005.

Often called brain drain, this loss of an educated, technically trained workforce presents a problem for area employers.

“It mostly depends on who you talk to” said Marty Modarsky, director of research and membership for the Employers Resource Council (ERC), a human resources services firm based in Mayfield Village. “Mostly we hear that high-tech positions are the hardest to fill, but manufacturing, engineering, accounting and marketing firms are also struggling to find good people.”

In May, spurred on by the Board of Regents’ findings, the Ohio Legislature approved $250 million in funding for work experience programs as part of an overall economic stimulus package. The project, called Choose Ohio First Co-op/Internship Program, will be funded in Fiscal Year 2008-09 with the goal of keeping Ohio’s college graduates in Ohio, creating a plug for the brain drain.

Future employment

In the meantime, employers have been taking matters into their own hands. Hundreds of Lake County’s businesses have established work experience programs to attract the best and the brightest students from Northeast Ohio colleges.

These internships and cooperative education programs offer students exposure to the corporate culture and on-the-job experience in exchange for pay, college credit and the promise of a future job. While the distinction between internships and cooperative education has blurred over the years, the contemporary internship has achieved a new level of sophistication.

Historically, cooperative education was an academic program that integrated classroom learning and productive work experiences in a field related to a student’s academic and career goals. An internship was characterized more loosely as a period of supervised training required to qualify for a profession. Sometimes they were paid positions, and sometimes not.

Barbara Britt, experiential education coordinator at Lakeland Community College, describes the cooperative education concept as a traditional model that started with engineering students.

“Students alternated between full-time work and full-time school,” Britt said. “But that old model doesn’t work today. It’s hard for the student to budget for it and employers often want someone on a more regular basis.”

As for unpaid internships, they’re still offered but your average college student can no longer afford to while away the summer without a paycheck, even if it means learning more about their chosen field of study.

ERC conducted a survey on internship practices and pay rates in Northeast Ohio and discovered that 80 percent of employers believed internships provided valuable workforce support and improved their ability to recruit new workers.

Today’s intern

Cindy Gorman of Meister Media Worldwide, an international agricultural publishing company based in Willoughby, said one reason internships are such a boon for business is the advanced skill level of today’s students.

“This generation, they work,” Gorman said. “They come in and they plow through it. It’s not an issue for them to be on the phone and writing e-mails at the same time. They are used to a faster pace.”

Not only can internships provide a talented and less costly workforce, they provide businesses with the chance to develop their future employees.

“Get them involved with the organization and familiarize them with your culture,” Gorman said. “Then, assuming everything works out, they become a very good candidate for a job.”

“Today’s interns are also doing a lot more for companies than copying and filing,” said Katie Synek, ERC’s survey coordinator, citing a trend to involve interns in special projects among the businesses surveyed. “Some of the interns were responsible for creating Web pages and others in the IT field had their interns develop database applications.”

In the past, these projects might be outsourced or put on the back burner because staff just didn’t have time. Lakeland’s Britt also sees companies benefiting from the state-of-the-art education students bring with them.

“Interns bring new technology and skills into the workplace, skills the company might not otherwise be exposed to,” she said.

Joe Tirpac, a human resources consultant working for Cleveland Construction in Mentor, said he has hired five interns from area colleges this summer.

“They are integrated into the daily activities of our project managers,” Tirpac said. “Two young men are working in our estimating department and others are out in the field at job sites wearing hard hats and steel-toed shoes learning how to put a commercial building together from the ground up.”

At Meister Media, two to five interns are hired each summer to work in the editorial and marketing departments, some of them returning from year to year. Gorman believes they keep coming back because they work on meaningful projects.

“Each journalism student walks away with a byline, a contribution they can take with them to their school, on their job searches and in their lives after graduation,” Gorman said. “Marketing students often work on trade show activity, in terms of coordinating logistics, setting up a booth, creating graphics and collateral items to bring to the trade show.”

Ryan Conatti of Mentor just started his third rotation as a summer intern at Meister Media. He said he stumbled on the opportunity when doing a Google search during his first year at Mount Union College in Alliance.

“I applied for this internship because it was local and it paid,” Conatti said, citing unpaid internships as a financial hardship.

Careful planning required

Whether or not to offer summer internships, paid or unpaid, is a question businesses have to answer for themselves, Modarsky said.

“Just doing an internship for the heck of it is not a good idea but if you have a true business need, we have students coming out of area universities and colleges that can meet that need,” he said.

Gorman was responsible for starting the internship program at Meister Media 10 years ago and said it has grown into a robust program.

“Interns go back to their schools and tell other students and we get more deeply engaged,” she said. “It has built on itself.”

When asked how she got the ball rolling, Gorman said she simply started reaching out to area colleges that had programs pertinent to the needs of the company.

“I connected to the department chairs and not just their placement service,” Gorman said. “I had them come here to see where the interns would be working.”

Tirpac started his first program at the Hoover vacuum company when internships were practically unheard of and then did it again in 1995 for Cleveland Construction.

“You really need to cultivate a relationship with the professors in university departments,” Tirpac said. “You can’t show up at their doorsteps and say we’re Cleveland Construction, give us your finest.”

Regardless of how or when they were started, all successful internship programs have one thing in common; careful planning.

“Make sure you define in detail the scope of your internship, how long it will last, how many hours and what you really need help with,” Modarsky recommends.

Some companies even partner with a professor or department chair to plan out specific learning opportunities and educational objectives.

At US Endoscopy, Human Resources Project Leader Jennifer Clemente said their managers really welcome the help.

“In January and February, we send a note out to our managers to let them know the time is approaching to solidify candidates for internships,” she said.

That’s all she needs to do and the requests come tumbling in. Clemente said she has hired several interns to fill some of the 42 positions US Endoscopy adds each year.

Make no mistake; it’s not altruism on their part. As Clemente tells it, “We have found top talent here.”

And, there have been no complaints. Not one of the human resource professionals could come up with a downside to their internship programs.

“These kids are really hard-working,” Clemente said. “They know the marketplace is tough and they know they need to have a good resume that puts them a step above other candidates.”

By offering successful internships and hiring interns after graduation, these companies are doing their part to plug Ohio’s brain drain.

“The more employers create and showcase those opportunities the better we will be able to shift that perception that this economy doesn’t have any jobs,” Modarsky said.

Cindy Illig-Lum is a Madison Township freelance writer.