University Relations - Internship Program

I remember my 9 months internship program in London, it was fruitful, it was Win Win situation for both of us, I earned my final year tuition fee and gained valuable experience.

During my career, my company recruited intern for all disciplines, from Engineering field to Administration. Duration from as short as 10 weeks to 9 months and its varies from university to university. I have memorable experience leading Internship Program for a period of 18 months.

For a student, they experience 9am to 5pm working life, office politic and expose to what the market really needed.

As a company, it is a minimum cost to hire and demostrate the mentor leadership and a talent pool for future placement.

Is all internship program successful? Not really, some mentor assign a good project and intern gain knowledge from it, some mentor just want a spare hand, trigger a red flag.

So, when you are think of runing a internship program, you need to make sure you have a project and a mentor to coach them.

Project Planning - Pick the low fruit first

When start a project, it is important to identify the key player and key activities, and start building project timeline - identify the critical path.

You may not be able to breakdown small tasks from the key activities, that is fine, but most important is you have list down small important tasks that you foreseen that this task need to take place first. So, pick the low fruit first, some how it will lead you to another small task when you execute the project.

That is a phrase said, "when ship arrive at the port, the bridge will straight by itself".

HPI Model - Improve Contingency Labor Turnover Rate by 80%

Do you believe that high turnover has nothing to do with company monetary reward?

Double digit turnover per month is an alarming number to the management, at that time the average turnover per month in the market was record 17% per calendar month, and we were more than that. My role was to understand why? How to stabilized the workforce and reduce the turnover.

Within 6 months of continuous business process improvement and implementing integrate information system, I managed to reduce the turnover to single digit and continue to maintain an average 4% to 6% turnover per month.

During this 6 months period, I started benchmarking project, hope we are able to share the knowledge among us in the same industries. Unfortunately, no success. A special working committees were setup, and we done HPI 6 block assessment. Finally, we came to a conclusion - "Environment" and "Information". Since we all paid according to the market, it is not surprise to me.

Information is critical success of this project, without information it will be a "Blind led the Blind", where it end? Well within circle of their communities.

Environment issues is more a common sense, as long as a channel for the "people" to bring it up their concern and address it accordingly, it can be resolve, and most of the problem arise is misunderstand.

Team collaboration and participation are very critical on every project. Have collaboration without participation, then it mean you are a team. If you have collaboration and participation, it mean you have working team.

Mine advice is "Get your hand dirty".

Would you hire someone who have hand-on experience or someone who has working experience?

Great book on Internal Labor Market

There are market benchmark data you can purchase or you can participate on their market survey to find out where your company is relative to the same industries or related to other industries. That is external factor and like it or not, it is not 100% apple to apple comparison.

What about internal data that is available in your fingertip? that cost you nothing and yet equally powerful! That give you a true picture of your current internal Labor market.




I recommend you to read "Play To Your Strengths - Managing Your Internal Labor Markets for Lasting Competitive Advantage" by Haig R Nalbantian, Richard A Guzzo, Dave Kieffer and Jay Doherty. This book is available in Amazon.com. it is worth to invest.


In chapter4, the author mentioned internal labor market, it show number employee hire, promoted and left of an organization. Take this ideas, I built an web application, consolidated information from vary sources (SAP PA/PA, OM, PM, C&B), compiled it into a simple HR dashboard, just like what is described in Chapter 4 ILM diagram, a business tools that provides a lot of flexibilities to cater for fundamental need for each and every organization. From analysing, understanding, simulating and implementing Organization Development (OD) intervention where is applicable.

Does exit interview has any value?

If you are HR professional, do you think "Exit Interview" has value? For me is "Yes" and "No".

YES - because it highlight to us where the short flow is, and we need to address it to prevent it from happening again. What will be the common drive force for people leaving the organization? normally, there are more than 1 reason why people leave. One of them bound to be MONEY and another one will be better career opportunities. It interpret that your company is only pay to the market, secondly there are too many blocker around; or you are the blocker.

NO - because how many us leave the organization will tell you the truth reason behind during exit interview? For a leaver, they will think....

- What is for me?
- What is the risk to me?

Let look at the other side of the coin. So, if people telling you the truth, and you are not able to address the issue, others will think, what is the point of telling you the truth again!

THE "TRUTH" WILL ALWAYS NOT NICE TO HEAR

But instead, they will tell you all the company nice thing and good stuff that he/she can recall, and the rest that he / she cannot recall, you know very well what I mean. People always want to kept a good impression during the exit interview, and hope 1 day when opportunities arise, he/she can come back to work.

What do you think?

Understand Your Customer need

Understand your customer is very important, is the business process / project that you are working on is a "Value added" or "Add Value", the make a lot of different.

Your customer like "Add Value" which make their life easier. If "Value Added", it is very hard to get their buy in, chance is your customer will just do what your asked for on top of what they are already doing it now, another word purely "fulfill" the minimum, does it sound familiar?

What is "Return On Investment - ROI" your bosses will asked for every process automation.
This formula I was thought:-

Cost of Labor > Cost of Technologies Investment

Cost of Labor = Headcount x base pay x time spend

Cost of Technologies Investment = Hardware Investment + Software Investment

Training the End User...this is painful part of HR system implementation...can technologies help?

Now a day, a lot of Human Resource system come with employee self service solution. It is quite common the training material was textual, informative and confusing, or grand mother story. The more sophisticated the Human Resource system the longer the story.

With the same material, a presenter can come up with many version of presenting the material and it is not consistency and there is not encore. What about Train The Trainer (TTT)?

Shi Fu teach his/her student only 80% of the skill, 20% is kept to protect him/herself.

Do you agree!

User only use the HR "self service" system on need basis or in the blue moon.

Is there a solution?

Yes. If you goto any Microsoft and Apple tutorial website, you will notice they are providing audio visual training material. Click here to view one of the product demo.

There are many way to skin a cat, this is one of the best way to save time and money. That is what your boss like to hear.