Internship: A Success Story

Source: The Marc Rosenberg Blog

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Marc Rosenberg.

Five competing but friendly local CPA firms in Chicago worked together to launch a staff internship program this summer that truly achieved synergistic results.

The program

1. Eight interns were accepted out of 27 applicants.
2. The program was eight weeks long, running in June and July.
3. The curriculum included classroom instruction plus hands-on experience, working with real client projects.
4. Each student received a $2,500 scholarship.
5. The curriculum was quite broad, including audit, review, compilations, 1040, S-corp and sales tax returns, CCH engagement software, QuickBooks software, an overview to CPA firm marketing and a session on how CPA firms operate.

Feedback from the interns

• “Shadowing” of different staff members as they performed client work was the interns' favorite part of the program.
• Software training was rated highly because students don't get this in school.
• Lots of time was spent with the partners of the five firms, giving them an exposure that will be tremendously helpful.
• The interns “got the message” that bringing in business and cultivating personal relationships with clients are keys to success.

Benefits to the firms

• The opportunity to thoroughly evaluate eight top-notch interns nicely positions the firms to hire at least one of them.
• The firms enhanced their relationships with major universities.
• Creating the program's educational content opened the eyes of the firms and triggered improvements to their training.
• Eighty-six partners and staff from the five firms were able to take advantage of a time-honored best practice of training: The best way to learn is to teach.

For the complete post, read “5 Chicago Firms Create Innovative Staff Internship Program.”

From The Marc Rosenberg Blog, October 2, 2012, blog.rosenbergassoc.com.