Building an intern programme

IBM may be viewed by many as a giant in information technology, but it hasn't always been the first choice for jobseekers. As the Internet boomed in the 1990s, young people who wanted to work at the frontiers of computer science saw IBM as irrelevant, says Jane Harper, who runs the company's programme for talent-scouting at universities. Instead, the brightest and best joined Internet start-ups, where they felt they would have more direct involvement in developing new technologies.

To arrest this trend, IBM set up a US intern programme in 1996 called Extreme Blue (derived from the firm's nickname ‘Big Blue’). Aimed at undergraduates, master's and PhD students one year away from finishing their degree, Extreme Blue puts the interns at the cutting edge by assigning them to projects that have a genuine chance of reaching the market-place.

Under the scheme, three scientific and technical interns are teamed with an MBA student for the commercial angle, and the group is then guided by an IBM mentor. The 12-week internships have proved so popular, says Harper, that this year nearly 4,500 students applied for the 200 available places.

Extreme Blue is part of a broad strategy at IBM, which this year will see the company take on some 2,000 interns in the United States alone. Other schemes include ProjectView, which targets women, under-represented minorities and people with disabilities.

Internships make for a good trial period for both employer and prospective employees, notes Harper. Indeed, IBM sees its various intern programmes as a good way to help it fill its employment pipeline. At the beginning of this year, the company announced plans to expand its workforce by some 15,000 people. Many of these new jobs are likely to be based in China or India, so it is no surprise that Extreme Blue has now been implemented in both Beijing and Bangalore — as well as in Toronto, Canada. The programme is also being run year-round rather than only during the summer.

But perhaps the true measure of Extreme Blue's success, says Harper, is how many of the programme's interns stay on to become full-time employees. Even though the dotcom bubble has well and truly burst, “it's just as hard to get the top talent”, she says. Nevertheless, she adds, Extreme Blue is attracting — and retaining — a lot more top talent than IBM was seeing ten years ago.