The Facelift Your Mobile Internship Program Needs (Desperately)
A Spruce-Up is Exactly What The Mobile Intern Ordered
A New Type of Intern
Teens spend an average of nine hours a day online, according to Common Sense Media, which includes time on their phones either texting, calling, or using apps.
Our phones have become an extension of ourselves, and apps have become integrated into our daily lives. Since everyone has a smart phone and everyone needs an app for everything, app development has never been more important, more exciting, or more lucrative.
Mobile development, however, is a fairly new career field and internships for it are popping up every year.
While that’s great and all, the problem is that most of the positions are so new, the industry hasn’t created a consistent structure of how to handle mobile development interns.
Mobile development in general has a huge learning hump to get over in order to be at all useful for the team.
Not to mention, managers who have never worked as a developer in mobile don’t understand that a majority of mobile interns are either self-taught or just have a curiosity for it.
The Current Solution
The current “industry standard” for mobile development internships is this (a loose but consistent evaluation):
The manager that is in charge of a mobile development intern does one of two things: either they plop the intern on a random team for the whole duration of their internship, which can get stale and block/hinder the learning process, or they try to move you around to different teams too quickly, which doesn’t let you become comfortable enough to get anything productive done.
An intern needs structure.
In order to have a successful and fulfilling internship, interns need a roadmap laid out that will help them learn as much as possible, get a broad range of development experience, and gain invaluable understanding of the mobile industry in practice.
I have been a mobile development intern for the past 4 years and, during that time, I have experienced how companies handle mobile interns, from beauty, to startups, to grocery. Everyone handles it differently.
The ideal structure of a mobile development internship is one that will most benefit the student, regardless of their experience, and will maximize their time and learning on the job (at least I think it will, who knows).
A Better Solution
The following internship structure is made up 4 teams, 3 mobile development teams and 1 not, and takes place over 14 weeks.
Team 1
The first team will be an intro to the code, the company, and the mobile community. One way to do this in one fell swoop is to have the intern create a mini app; something small to build that should include a design pattern, views, controllers, etc. We just want them to create a working product here. This will help both the manager and the intern gauge where they are and how much they know. Depending on their skill level, this project could take anywhere from a couple days to the whole month.
Mobile development is a niche part of computer science, so not many people will have real world exposure to it.
If the intern has experience and finishes this project fairly quickly, pair them up with a senior dev and have them walk the intern through the code. From there, the intern could work on a couple bugs and learn the company’s design patterns. The small experience of making an app will give them their own project where they can ask for help, take their time, become familiar with their coworkers, and let the manager have time to decide where to place them next.
Time Frame: First 3 weeks/ first month
Objectives:
- Make a lil app
- Get familiar with code
- Pair with a lead/senior dev to show them the codebase and how everything works
- Work on a couple small bugs
- Learn the company’s preferred design patterns
Team 2
The second team will introduce the intern to jobs involved in the mobile development space outside of development. Project managers, UX/UI designers, QA, Data Analysts, etc. Exposing the intern to positions that directly support mobile developers can help them gain an understanding and appreciation for other jobs they interact with daily as a mobile dev. Even if the student is certain that they want to develop for the rest of their life, putting them in someone else’s shoes can be a valuable experience.
Team 2 is the most valuable because it will help the student see the bigger picture.
They will see how everything works together, how the complicated and oiled machine of business operates. Students will probably not get experience or exposure to these types of jobs in college.
Time Frame: 3 weeks
Objectives:
- Shadow a Project Manager, UX/UI designer, Data Analyst, QA, or Scrum Master
- Learn about a position outside of development
- Explore positions that could use their other strengths such as communication, design, or analytics
- Expose the student to daily tasks, long term projects, and the thought process behind decisions being made
Teams 3 & 4
Teams 3 and 4 is all about dev work. A majority of the internship should be spent coding because that’s why they’re there, right? While Team 1 will involve development and being a part of a team who are working on features, this team will give the intern a different experience with development, treating them like any other developer with responsibilities and goals. It is important for the intern to work on something real, not busy work. At the end of the internship, the student should be able to point out a feature they worked on, a portion of an app in the App Store/Google Play Store that they can show people, or analytics of how much their features have impacted users.
Having something tangible that they can be proud of is extremely valuable to have and sets them up to succeed in the future, and these are the teams that can make that happen.
Time Frame: 4 weeks for each team
Objectives:
- Code. That’s it.
Does Order Matter?
Besides Team 1 being at the beginning, no. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th teams can be in any order, as long as they achieve the objectives that are assigned to them.
Don’t Have 4 mobile teams or are a startup?
That’s okay! If this format doesn’t work for you, take ideas and objectives from this article to use as a guideline. There is no right or wrong way to structure a mobile development internship, so don’t feel pressured to stick to this format. Take out a team or two, switch up the order, create your own objectives and format based on the resources available to you.
The most important part of an internship is for the intern to learn and as long as they are having new experiences and being challenged at work, do whatever works best for the interests of your teams and what they could learn at your company.
Believe in your interns, they are full of surprises.
