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My boss is looking to get IT interns to give us some extra hands to assist with basic tasks. She wants me to come up with some basic tasks to have them do. We are a small team (6 people) and I’m having trouble coming up with simple things for them to do. Do any of you use interns and if so what do you have them do?

8 Spice ups
2

My suggestion would be Active Directory, Printer management, Software updates on machines, get them to do some pricing calculations of future solutions/implementations.

First level support for staff/end users is in my opinion something viable for them to do as its pretty straight forward if they can hone in on their google-fu skills.

2 Spice ups
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We have used interns for all kinds of things.

  1. Asset audit

  2. Asset assigning

  3. We taught them things also. Internships should not be BS like they usually are. We would teach them some scripting. (using the sandbox)

  4. Have them cover level 1 and 2 support with users. They will be more willing to do actual stuff.

We found that giving them some of these kinds of jobs they do want to learn. You never know. You might find that diamond in the rough. I interned in a different field and it was awful. Made me re-think what I was going to school for. They become reliable functioning team members. Show them the structure of how it works. Giving them Level 1 and 2 support frees up the person doing that now to do something else. The entire team can benefit from it. Plus you are still fully staffed and cross training can happen. We all know that doesn’t happen like we think it will.

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As per the comments above, i think anything to get the ball rolling, be that CAT5/6 cable building, to ripping a PC apart and upgrading where an easy adjustment could be made, i.e. RAM swap / drive etc.

Building PC’s in terms of deploying using boot media and loading company based software if not using imaging.

Documentation in terms of share permissions, AD, roles, company policies, creating and maintaining SOPS etc…

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Interns are NOT EXTRA HANDS. Interns take a ton of mentoring and should only be brought in if you are going to be fair and give them the dedicated time. Otherwise you are hurting them not helping them, and they WONT help you because they dont know enough yet.

Dont give interns busy work, dont make them read reports. Show them thought-processes when troubleshooting by having them try to solve level1\2 with you\another tech. Nothing an intern does should be self directed. You can set them a task but you will have to check that task has been completed and then provide phase 2 of task or another one. Letting them observe and participate is the way to go.

5 Spice ups
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This is a terrrrrrible idea unless you enjoy random troubleshooting. Always buy pre-made cables or if you need custom length order them.

Honestly don’t see a lot of midlife PC upgrades these days. Everything your buying should include SSDs, local storage needs shouldn’t really be growing that much.

Why would anyone build a PC Autopilot plus our MDM agent and a machine auto-enrolls on first login and pulls down what it needs.

1 Spice up
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Well, interns are there to learn so it will take a bit of investment in your time to get them up to speed. By the time they are integrated and doing well, they ‘should’ be on their way to a good job that actually pays real money and benefits. I have handled interns before. I usually get them started on PC imaging and replacements, helping out with the helpdesk, or projects that involve someone who can take time to do side tasks that normally would gobble up a lot of time IT admins can’t spare. For example, inventory audit, etc… I also got them involved in printer management and some active directory tasks (accounts and passwords). Whenever I had to rack a server, I had them come along and showed them the datacenter and how things were set up. If anything, you are going to be their mentor and work to make good IT techs out of them. They will be your shadows and it is up to use to not steer them wrong. The best feeling is seeing your intern either get hired into the same department at your company as a full time tech or at least moving on to a similar job elsewhere and just crushing it like a pro.

3 Spice ups
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Auditing, Simple repairs, admin work such as AD, Exchange etc…

The anything you don’t wanna do!

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Is your Asset tracking up to date? That is a daunting task that would be good for some interns.

1 Spice up
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Interns in AD? Are you THAT busy? Yeah, no, not in my shop.

I had a group of three high school interns last summer, they did a fine job for me with rolling out six dozen Windows 10 machines to finish the Win7 purge. They also upgraded video cards in CAD/Engineering workstations, did some peripheral installs, overall they were quite productive. The big thing was training in two sessions for the first couple of days, then letting them loose. They all got notebooks and basic toolboxes, the latter which they took home with them. I wrote up their stipend applications and they all got $500 for their 100 hour internships, good deal for everyone!

I also had a college intern, way more sophisticated fellow, he worked for minimum wage (in CA that’s $12/hr) and did an outstanding job. Very analytical and methodical, super quiet but a very solid young fellow.

I’d suggest giving them plenty to do in something they can succeed in 75% of the time, let them learn by running into something they CAN’T succeed in the first time around. Monitor upgrades, workstation changeouts, heck I even figured to let them do IP cameras if we had time.

This summer I’ll only take one or two, it’s a time-suck if you do it right. Also, no more Win7!

1 Spice up
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Helpdesk triage, Printer upkeep/management, general cleanup (I know we generate a lot of trash (ie boxes)), documentation.
If you have the time maybe show off some items and teach them on some of the equipment (VoIP phones, etc)

If all else fails… Intern Fights!!!
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1 Spice up
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Grunt work.

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That depends.

In case they’re temporary staff (new employee every couple of months) - assign them to routine tasks: simple helpdesk requests (“It asks me to press ‘any’ key”), password reset, asset tracking, jammed printers, cable management, etc.

If there is an opportunity for them to grow professionally - you’ll have to train them. Try splitting their responsibilities and cycle them from time to time.