Internships are a waste of time. Until they aren’t.
Creative Director, Jason Perelson, writes:
One of the things I regularly struggled with after settling in Australia, was how we, as creatives, are able to nurture talent in a way that is feasible to the business. Because, let’s be honest, we’re business people just as much as we are creatives.
I often get requests from wonderfully talented people to do work experience weeks, or free internships. The problem is, we just don’t have time for that. To have a student, as nice as they are, pop in to sit around the office isn’t useful.
To us, or them.
Free internships are a great way to get someone in to run errands and make coffees – but how do they learn and grow in a meaningful way.
Well, the easy answer is – pay the interns. Legally speaking, you’re able to have interns work on agency jobs that actually deliver results. Professionally speaking, they’ll actually gain something out of the experience because you’re able to run it for 3 months, 6 months or even a year.
And that’s exactly why we’ve started ZooKeeper.
A fully paid internship programme, with properly implemented and monitored Personal Development Plans that not only hold the intern accountable to learning and development milestones, but us as well.
I want to make sure that, as an agency, we are growing and nurturing talent in a way that develops their skills and abilities further so that they’re either fully armed to be hired on a permanent basis by us, or can hit the ground running anywhere in the country (or world).
We recognised a need, and went ahead and did it. I’m tremendously proud that we’ve already secured an incredibly talented designer who has branded Zoo Keeper as their first job, and already has his teeth stuck into real work, and works closely with our ops team, our designers and Senior Art Director.
In our industry, there are two types of people: those who sit around saying someone should do something… and those who just do.
The new blood at Zoo Group are always going to be the latter.
If you’d like to find out more about ZooKeeper, or Zoo Group, get in touch via info@zoogroup.com