Candidates with hands-on experience can help diversify the applicant pool and battle the skills shortage. Yet many companies fail to recognise the value of developing strong internship programmes. Not so with MIP Holdings, which has a longstanding commitment to an internship system that has proven very effective for the company.
"Internships offer a win-win situation for us as well as potential staff who can offer new knowledge and skills to our workforce," says Richard Firth, CEO of MIP Holdings. "Our programme allows us to see first-hand what the intern has to offer, and this has proven to be a much more effective training tool than the regular process."
The company's internship programme is intended for young "unskilled" persons who wish to pursue a career in software engineering. MIP trains and mentors them for a period of four months, followed by mandatory employment with experienced colleagues to complete two years with the programme. Qualification for this programme involves an aptitude test and an employment interview, and MIP then retains four candidates every four months.
The aptitude tests are conducted by an external company, which specialises in identifying the unique skills that make for the best software engineers. This is a test that many South African software engineers had to pass before access was granted to the infamous "Van Zyl & Pritchard" programming course in the 1980s and 1990s. Firth was a successful candidate and believes strongly in the methodology.
If the prospective interns pass this test (the pass mark is 70%), MIP then invites them for the interview. The successful candidates attend courses at Progress Software Corporation, as well as participating in a number of internal courses. "We follow these procedures to ensure a good fit," explains Firth. "Once the four months have passed, we offer the candidates a permanent position in one of our divisions, and our stringent evaluation in the beginning ensures that we offer the opportunity to the right people. It has been so successful that we have offered 95% of our interns a permanent job."
MIP's comprehensive approach to upskilling its workforce extends especially to newly-hired interns, who are regularly evaluated to ensure they are coping, and each of whom is assigned to a "tutor" to assist them with development and understanding the product.
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