IT companies who train interns in software development, consulting and services often need to impart general skills and give a strong business context and grounding for trainees to be successful in their training.
These often underestimated general skills are vital because the internship is the recruit's first job and they need to be onboarded and oriented about the company and the product, as well as other aspects that are new to them.
These include general life skill issues like their first pay cheque and why deductions like tax and PAYE are taken off their gross pay. What a credit rating is and how it can impact on possible future car or home loans.
Often there are gaps in their education that need to be filled like math skills because these are vital for coding and programming. For example units of measurement and the metric system have to be covered in the training, because many interns are unfamiliar with business processes that buy in bulk (kilogrammes), but sell in smaller units (grams), and this has to be built into the software programing.
The problem with some intern programmes in the market is that the students are not given such skills to complement the software development training itself and this is often the reason why interns don't progress and end their training successfully.
I have witnessed in the market that some internships don't orientate their interns correctly and pay them very little, just piling work on without explaining the purpose behind it, ending up with the new recruit being disaffected and learning very little at the end. It's vital that mentoring and training must add value and useable skills to interns and not just go through the motions to tick a sustainability box.
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