About
Summer is about to start and if you are an undergraduate student, you’re looking for an internship anywhere but you know that most companies in Egypt don’t provide real value, if any, for their interns. But let me guess, you’re telling yourself that you need it for your resume. Well, at Unplugged, we decided very early on to change this and now we are voicing our case study to explain that internships have a huge return on companies, teams and individuals.
Our program is a win-win-win situation (yes 3 wins) don’t be confused. First, let me explain our internship program. Every summer and for the past 3 years, we’ve been recruiting a team of developers (frontend and backend developer) and a team of designers; 31 individuals in total. The purpose of the internship is not to let them work on our client’s projects, but rather, to tap into an innovative product. The timeline is that we launch the prototype by the end of the summer and quickly test the viability of the concept.
The interns WIN
June starts and we assemble the first batch of interns and brief them on the product we want to launch to get them excited. During the first 2 weeks, our senior developers and designers coach and mentor interns on using the different programming languages and user experience design techniques. By now, everyone’s fired up and ready to build something awesome! The designers start working on branding the concept along with creating a Corporate Identity (CI), then they start designing the web application. Developers start creating the project architecture, database diagrams and work on the user stories that we want to implement. At the end of the 2-3 months internship period, interns end up with a truly valuable experience from a technical standpoint. They also develop their interpersonal skills through dealing with teammates in a group work context, learn how to work with a manager, solve real world problems and much more.
The team WIN
The internship program is a perfect opportunity for our employees to test their leadership skills through coaching interns. They test their management capabilities without making a long-term commitment in a leadership role. And guess what? You always learn better when you teach someone! The curriculum that our team creates for interns isn’t just beneficial for them but also for new hires as they have already been prepared and tested multiple times.
The strategy WIN
Guess how many of last year’s 11 interns were hired afterwards? 5 and counting!
As you can see, our internship program was, and still is, one of the main sources of great new hires, lowering our recruitment costs and getting us some of the best talents out there. Over the past 3 years, we were able to create 4 prototypes, including elnoorgeh.com, one of the best projects we have ever designed. And believe it or not, we were able to close a lot of deals when showing our potential clients how creative we could be.
We are committed to make a positive impact on our people, our company and the communities where we operate.
This is part of our mission statement which I truly believe in. We vow to do our best to continue creating this impact on our community. Finally, I hope that this format of win-win-win internships spreads to more companies enabling them to create internship programs that would impact their team, innovation metrics and recruitment costs.
This summer, we are offering internship positions for backend developers, frontend developers and designers. If you are interested, check out the details on our careers page here.
P.S you can come to work in shorts!
#PurposeDrivenStartups
