Why high school interns may be the key to recruiting and retention strategies

College students may think they're getting ahead by participating in internships while they get their degrees, but the truth is that they may be setting themselves up for failure instead. 

Thirty-eight percent of companies said they offer internship opportunities for high school students, according to a new survey from American Student Assistance, a nonprofit dedicated to helping kids plan for their futures. And while that's only an 8% increase from 2018, the rise in popularity could be a good sign for the future of early career intervention. 

"In the last few years since COVID we are seeing that young people want to really connect what they're doing in the classroom to the real world," says Julie Lammers, SVP of advocacy and corporate social responsibility at American Student Assistance. "That engagement and connection piece is so important to young people and internships are a good way of doing that."

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Ninety-two percent of employers said that giving back to the community was a very important reason for providing internships to high school students. Another 89% said it was to help individual students gain skills and 85% to expose students to careers that might be inaccessible to them. As a result, those companies have seen significant benefits to investing in younger students. 

Seventy-seven percent said they used high school interns to build the pipeline for entry-level positions, while 86% said high school interns strengthened their industry pipeline as a whole, according to the survey. Eighty-one percent said that high school internships filled their employment pipeline with diverse candidates, and 78% said these opportunities enhanced their organizations' DEI efforts. This success is due to the fact that it exposes future employees to the experiences they'll need to succeed in full-time employment sooner rather than later, according to Lammers. 

"We already know what employers are searching for in young talent," she says. "What we needed to figure out was how do we make sure that young people are building the types of skills that employers want long term, because [traditionally] we haven't thought about it from that standpoint. For many employers, a four-year degree was and still is the only benchmark." 

That line of thinking is not only disadvantageous to companies, but it also doesn't set students up for success in their future careers. Currently, students are encouraged to explore their career options in their junior and senior years of high school while simultaneously applying for college or other post-graduation opportunities. But since they started this process so late, they may have missed out on prerequisites for a career path they are interested in pursuing. 

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By the time young talent has then gone through their post-secondary education, they often end up in internships they may not like or applying to a position where there's a mismatch between what they are passionate about and what the job actually entails. But restarting a college career is expensive, and many students don't have that option available to them. 

"The reality is we are starting these conversations way too late," Lammers says. "We should be focusing on how we can move some of those opportunities to high school or even middle school when the risk of trying and failing is not as high and when it's actually encouraged for young people to say they don't want something so they aren't forced to go down that path moving forward." 

Consequently, fostering connections between young people and their careers early on could also have a positive impact on the current state of employee engagement and turnover, according to Lammers. Employees who had internship opportunities in their field of choice before college have more confidence in the roles they're applying for and are less likely to be unhappy at work or quit shortly after starting in a position.  

"After a structured internship there's a lot less risk for an employer because there's a lot more stability," Lammers says. "That prospective employee has already had the opportunity to experience the career, understand what it is, get some training from either the employer themselves or another organization. All of those things are vitally important for a new employee to be happy in their job and to stay." 

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Despite all of the benefits there are still challenges organizations face to employ young talent, even temporarily. Forty-three percent of organizations cited determining the work best suited to young interns as the top barrier for rolling out a high school internship program, the survey found, followed by 42% who said it was attracting qualified interns and 39% worried about scheduling around interns' availability. 

High school students are also minors and are subject to different state labor laws than college students. Many may also lack reliable transportation and may require a travel stipend or additional flexibility. However, the potential is definitely worth the investment, according to Lammers. 

"We often don't give kids enough credit for what they're capable of doing," she says. "All of the obstacles are things that can be learned, you have to be very deliberate and remind yourself and your organization that these are young people who have not had professional experiences before and that part of the joy of doing this with young people is being the ones to expose them to those opportunities."