By building a pipeline of eager, talented employees, and embedding institutional knowledge in your organization, you can reduce the burden of extra work on remaining employees and reinvigorate your business. Photo via Getty Images

Short-term talent shortages can feel overwhelming, especially if your company is navigating staff shortages, while also planning for future growth.

While internship programs can get a bad rap, there are many benefits to providing opportunities for early career professionals in any organization. By building a pipeline of eager, talented employees, and embedding institutional knowledge in your organization, you can reduce the burden of extra work on remaining employees and reinvigorate your business.

Get more engagement and develop champions at your company by incorporating three vital ingredients into your internship program strategy:

  1. Hire based on core values & interns’ ability to thrive at your company
  2. Invest in training
  3. Provide meaningful work

Build a strong team: hire based on ability to thrive 

To ensure your organization’s growth is coming from a diverse talent pool, build a hiring process around employees' future ability and core values, instead of what they have done in the past. Oftentimes, you’ll find that an intern’s coachability, willingness to learn and growth mindset are better determining factors towards future success than past experience.

During the recruitment and hiring process, ask your interns questions to probe values, interests, and passions. To determine if they have a growth mindset, you can ask, “What do you read in your time off to stay up to date with the latest trends in the industry? What did you learn yesterday?” or “Tell me about a time you received feedback. What did you do with this?”

Make sure that each intern that comes on board feels like a part of the team. Let them immerse themselves into your company’s culture, work environment, and industry by inviting them to your employee team-building activities, monthly company-wide conference calls, and other events that provide them with more context about your culture. Schedule weekly touchpoints with each intern to regularly check in on goals, their progress on tasks, and overall concerns. Not only will these meetings strengthen trust, but they will also position interns to succeed at your company.

Build resilience: invest in training

When you invest in a thoughtful, effective training experience, your interns will be more committed to the role because they’ll see the added effort you’re making towards their career.

Consider how your current training is structured and implemented so that your internship training experience is up to speed with the expectations of Gen-Z. Explore out-of-the-box training options, including coaching, virtual learning, and assessments that they will actually use.

In addition to the hard skills that are essential to supporting any company, ensure that you are training interns on core competencies. The National Association of Colleges and Employers identifies eight core competencies that are vital to career readiness: career & self-development, communication, critical thinking, equity & inclusion, leadership, professionalism, teamwork, and technology. When you teach interns these core competencies as soon as they join your organization, you will see an immediate boost in productivity, and you can objectively assess for future full-time employment.

Build momentum: provide meaningful work

After you’ve clearly mapped out your internship training experience, clearly outline projects from each of your company’s departments before you onboard interns. By planning ahead, and having a running list of projects that don’t require much explanation, you can give your interns a sense of purpose as soon as they join, which in turn will prevent bored interns from disengaging.

Ask interns what their goals are for their internship so you can not only help them make those goals a reality, but also tie their goals back to your company’s overall goals. As you offer meaningful enrichment opportunities, you will land top talent through your internship programs, and word will spread to bring in better talent for future internships.

Come out on top with a strong team

Businesses that take advantage of bringing on interns during a talent shortage can come out of hard times better prepared for the future. Once you have a strong and sustainable internship program, it will only grow and gain momentum.

Weather any storm that’s ahead by continuing to attract the best talent. Your company deserves it.

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Allie Danziger is the co-founder of Ampersand, an online training platform for businesses and professionals looking to level up their talent.

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Houston space company lands latest NASA deal to advance lunar logistics

To The Moon

Houston-based space exploration, infrastructure, and services company Intuitive Machines has secured about $2.5 million from NASA to study challenges related to carrying cargo on the company’s lunar lander and hauling cargo on the moon. The lander will be used for NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon and eventually to Mars.

“Intuitive Machines has been methodically working on executing lunar delivery, data transmission, and infrastructure service missions, making us uniquely positioned to provide strategies and concepts that may shape lunar logistics and mobility solutions for the Artemis generation,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus says in a news release.

“We look forward to bringing our proven expertise together to deliver innovative solutions that establish capabilities on the [moon] and place deeper exploration within reach.”

Intuitive Machines will soon launch its lunar lander on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to deliver NASA technology and science projects, along with commercial payloads, to the moon’s Mons Mouton plateau. Lift-off will happen at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida within a launch window that starts in late February. It’ll be the lander’s second trip to the moon.

In September, Intuitive Machines landed a deal with NASA that could be worth more than $4.8 billion.

Under the contract, Intuitive Machines will supply communication and navigation services for missions in the “near space” region, which extends from the earth’s surface to beyond the moon.

The five-year deal includes an option to add five years to the contract. The initial round of NASA funding runs through September 2029.

Play it back: Houston home tech startup begins 2025 with fresh funding

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 272

One of the dozen or so Houston startups kicking of the new year with fresh funding is SmartAC.com, a company that's designed a platform that enables contractors in the HVAC and plumbing industries to monitor, manage, and optimize their maintenance memberships through advanced sensors, AI-driven diagnostics, and proactive alerts.

Last month, the SmartAC.com raised a follow-on round with support from local investor Mercury to continue growth and expansion of the product, which has evolved on many ways since the company launched in 2020, emerging from stealth with $10 million raised in a series A. In a May 2023 interview for the Houston Innovators Podcast, Founder and CEO Josh Teekell explained how he embraced the power of a pivot.

The company's sensors can monitor all aspects of air conditioning units and report back any issues, meaning homeowners have quicker and less costly repairs. While SmartAC.com started with providing the service and tech to homeowners directly, Teekell says he's had a greater interest in working with plumbers and HVAC companies who then deploy the technology to their customers.

"It became quite evident that homeowners don't care about air conditioning really at all until their system breaks," Teekell says on the show. "The technology is really built around giving those contractors as another way to gain a customer relationship and keep it."

Revisit the podcast episode below where Teekell talks about SmartAC.com's last raise.

SmartAC.com's previous round in 2023 — a $22 million series B — was used grow its team that goes out to deploy the technology and train the contractors on the platform.

"We've been very fortunate to get some of the biggest names in Houston on our cap table," Teekell says in the May 2023 conversation. "Since we're raising a bunch of money locally, everyone understands what a pain air conditioning can be."

Houston biotech company tests hard-to-fight cancer therapeutics

fighting cancer

A Houston-based, female-founded biotech company has developed a treatment that could prove to be an effective therapy for a rare blood cancer.

Cellenkos Therapeutics has completed promising Phase 1b testing of its Treg cell therapy, CK0804, in the fight against myelofibrosis. According to a news release from the Cellenkos team, the use of its cord-blood-derived therapeutics could signal a paradigm shift for the treatment of this hard-to-fight cancer.

Cellenkos was founded by MD Anderson Cancer Center physician and professor Simrit Parmar. Her research at the hospital displayed the ability of a unique subset of T cells’ capability to home in on a patient’s bone marrow, restoring immune balance, and potentially halting disease progression.

Myelofibrosis has long been treated primarily with JAK (Janus Kinase) inhibitors, medications that help to block inflammatory enzymes. They work by suppressing the immune response to the blood cancer, but don’t slow the progression of the malady. And they’re not effective for every patient.

“There is a significant need for new therapeutic options for patients living with myelofibrosis who have suboptimal responses to approved JAK inhibitors,” Parmar says. “We are greatly encouraged by the safety profile and early signs of efficacy observed in this patient cohort and look forward to continuing our evaluation of the clinical potential of CK0804 in our planned expansion cohort.”

The expansion cohort is currently enrolling patients with myelofibrosis. What exactly are sufferers dealing with? Myelofibrosis is a chronic disease that causes bone marrow to form scar tissue. This makes it difficult for the body to produce normal blood cells, leaving patients with fatigue, spleen enlargement and night sweats.

Myelofibrosis is rare, with just 16,000 to 18,500 people affected in the United States. But for patients who don’t respond well to JAKs, the prognosis could mean a shorter span than the six-year median survival rate outlined for the disease by Cleveland Clinic.

Helping myelofibrosis patients to thrive isn’t the only goal for Cellenkos right now.

The company seeks to aid people with rare conditions, particularly inflammatory and autoimmune disorders, with the use of CK0804, but also other candidates including one known as CK0801. The latter drug has shown promising efficacy in aplastic anemia, including transfusion independence in treated patients.

The company closed its $15 million series A round led by BVCF Management, based in Shanghai, in 2021. Read more here.