QUALITY REMOTE INTERNSHIPS:                      GUIDELINES, TRAININGS AND MENTORING.

How to measure, control and keep the right balance work/education in a remote internship?

Remote internships are more and more important each day, as companies and globalization are evolving to delocalized working structures. But, how do you keep and maintain an efficient internship program within your company remotely?

In Remotebay.io, after interviewing more than 50 of our customers, we have compiled some of the most relevant information and key points you need to keep in mind in order to provide and do a succesful internship or remote placement.

1. Developing and demanding a good training plan. 

Training is the most fundamental part of any internship. As such, it is important that it is well-planned, thorough, and well-executed. One must keep in mind that this is what the students will learn from it as it is key for completing tasks properly.

We recommend you to clearly define beforehand all the training that will be provided as well as getting feedback from completed training. 

We have developed an evaluation form, that can be modified for your own needs, you can download it here. Furthermore, in order to have internal quality control, we also ask interns to sign all their training activities to confirm their participation.

Record all of your training sessions.

We are recording all our training sessions so interns can review it afterwards. That is why we use a simple and free tool called “Atubecatcher” https://www.atube.me that allows you to record your screen and voice easily.

We upload all these videos to our Youtube channel and provide access to all our interns and employees.

2. Tasks management

Set and organize tasks properly. 

Tasks must be clear, concise, concrete and have a deadline. We must bear in mind that students often lack professional experience, so offering clear, concrete, and concise tasks with deadlines is the right path. At Remotebay, we use the Trello tool, www.trello.com, for organising tasks, and we advise both students and companies to use it.

What is Trello? According to their website: Trello.com is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects on boards. In other words, thanks to Trello, you will be able to know what tasks are carried out, who works on a certain task and what is the status of a process.

Imagine a whiteboard, full of sticky note lists, with each note as a task for you and your team. Now imagine that each of those sticky notes has photos, attachments from other data sources like BitBucket or Salesforce, documents, and a place to comment and collaborate with your teammates. Now imagine that you can take that whiteboard anywhere you go on your smartphone, and you can access it from any computer via the web. 

There are other tasks management tools but this is one of the best and we recommend it to all our clients and students.

3. Communication

Communicate fluently. We understand that it is not possible for any of you to be connected by video call 8 hours a day, so we recommend the use of tools such as Slack for communication management and subsequent monitoring.

What is slack? Source: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/115004071768-What-is-Slack-

Slack is a collaboration tool that can replace email and help you and your team to work more easily. It has been created based on the way people collaborate in real life, so you can work online as efficiently as if you did it in person.

It is divided in workspaces:

A Slack workspace is made up of channels, where team members communicate and work together. Read on to learn more about Slack’s four key features.

And allows you to have conversations organized by channel:

In Slack, team members send messages and share files on channels. Create channels for teams, projects, offices or any other aspect that is relevant to your organization. You can have channels closed for private conversations that not all members should be able to access, or you can use shared channels to collaborate with an organization other than yours.

And check the history of messages.

When messages and files are shared on open channels, information flows freely throughout Slack. You can search your team’s conversation history in Slack to find relevant files, channels and messages, as well as people. With Slack’s searchable history, your conversations become part of your organization’s common knowledge.

Ideally, you will have a channel where you can add your interns and communicate with them, when you can and control the flow of the conversations without being interrupted often. 

4. Reviews & mentoring

At The Student Mobility group, we recommend having at least one conference call per week with the remote interns in order to receive personal feedback from the student, and to check their progress with the assigned tasks.

We believe this to be important, as it firstly ensures that interns are producing a high-quality output of work for the company, and that company goals and targets are met each month. Secondly, it helps students to feel a greater sense of achievement as they are being recognised for their work, leading to greater engagement with the company. Furthermore, providing interns with detailed feedback allows them to improve and learn, which ultimately, should be one of the main objectives of any internship programme. 

We also use tools such as Hangouts, Microsoft Teams or Zoom. These tools prove to be useful to keep the team connected through virtual meetings, where goals, strategies, and actions can be discussed. Zoom is also useful for 1-to-1 interactions where interns can meet with their mentor to discuss topics on a more individual basis. Finally, despite being in various locations whilst remote working, these tools bring people together to create a greater sense of unity and team spirit within the company.