Internships help prepare students for the real world, but how do you prepare your students to make the most of their internships? Many collegiate-level internship programs combine the hands-on experience of fieldwork with a supplementary, synchronous course, but what if you could augment your students’ experience with additional experiential training each week? What if you could easily assess their progress while helping them hone their skills in a low-risk environment?
To prepare students to take their first steps into the real world, you can offer them a Stukent Simternship™, or a simulated internship, as part of their internship requirements.
A Simternship is a semester-long simulation that places your students in a realistic working environment, allowing them to gain experience, build marketable skills, and increase their knowledge retention. Our Simternships pack months of role-specific training into a single semester, which means you won’t just help your students learn the material, but master it.
Want to know why you should incorporate a Stukent Simternship into your internship requirements? Read on!
The Value of Internships
It’s no surprise that your students need hands-on experience as part of their professional education. For decades, studies have shown that experiential learning helps students retain roughly 75% of the material they’ve learned. Hands-on experience makes a skill intuitive and helps students develop better critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving skills.
We all know that internships give students great benefits — interns gain insights into the day-to-day responsibilities, challenges, and rewards of working in their respective fields, all while clarifying their career interests and kickstarting their professional network. Internships are also a great way to obtain a competitive advantage in the job market, as many employers value practical experience and a demonstrated willingness to learn.
Internships obviously play a critical role in students’ professional development — so why would your students need a Simternship, too?
The Benefits of Simternships
For one, a Simternship asks students to step into the professional roles they’ll assume after graduation. Over a semester-long simulation, your students become marketing managers, PR practitioners, entrepreneurs, SEO specialists, and so much more. Stukent currently offers over 40 Simternships in the marketing, business, accounting, and communications spaces, with more experiences coming each semester.
In a Simternship, your students gain valuable insights into the day-to-day decisions, tools, and expectations of a position or role. Simternships mimic real-world workspaces, which means students will need to communicate with superiors, coworkers, and customers while managing their assigned tasks. Round by round, the Simternship will present your students with new challenges to overcome, helping them to refine their skills each week.
“Most business and marketing simulations prepare learners for the c-suites,” says Garrett Brock, Vice President of Marketing at Stukent. “Unfortunately, students don’t get hired for these roles right out of college, which means they may not use what they’ve learned for years. Stukent’s Simternships prepare students for their first job after graduation, which means they’ll have the experience they need to hit the ground running on day one.”
Additionally, Simternships give your students the opportunity to perform tasks they may not be assigned as interns, helping them to develop additional skills and deepen their understanding of their chosen field. For example, the Stukent Digital Marketing Simternship allows students to step into the role of a digital marketing manager, where they will build PPC ads, perform strategic keyword research, target and segment audiences, analyze KPIs, optimize landing pages, manage budgets, and more. The Digital Marketing Simternship arms students with all the skills they need to succeed in the field of digital marketing, even if they aren’t given the opportunity to practice those skills during the course of their internship.
Most importantly, Simternships are economical, affordable, and allow students to complete their work on their own time. With a Simternship, your students aren’t limited to office hours — they can work on a press release in the Crisis Communication Simternship at midnight; get on a simulated discovery call with a new client in the Advanced Selling Simternship in between classes; or explore the different facets of business in the Intro to Business Simternship before lunch.
To learn more about how Stukent Simternships work, please see the Simternships™: Redefining Business Education article or schedule a demo with a Stukent course consultant today!
Simternships, Internships, or Both?
Both! A Stukent Simternship is meant to augment the classic internship, not be a one-to-one replacement. Simternships give students broader, more standardized access to the experiences they need to thrive in their future careers without making more work for you.
If your students do a Simternship before they do their internship, they will be better equipped to handle the pressures and demands of their internship work. With a Simternship, your students will make a positive impression on their employers, which helps them to stand out, get better references, and perhaps even secure a job. By investing in a Stukent Simternship, you can boost your students’ chances of succeeding in their internships and ultimately in their careers.
A Simternship can “fill in the gaps” of an internship and ensure each student gets a well-rounded experience. You may include a Simternship after or contemporaneously with students’ internships, which allows students to practice and reinforce their skills throughout their internship program. Whether or not your university adopts Simternships for course credit is a matter of institutional policy; however, with Stukent Simternships, you can rest easy knowing that every student in your program will have a great experience.
But don’t just take it from us — here’s what some of our students have said about Stukent Simternships!
“Ultimately, the experience I gained from Stukent’s Digital Marketing Simternship taught me how to use the strongest marketing tool that exists. … Even in my interview with Adobe, I got to talk about the Simternship. It was really exciting to let them know that I had marketing experience, and it was just a huge leg up in all my interviews.” — David Cornella, Associate Account Strategist, Google
“Stukent’s Digital Marketing Simternship has brought the connection to in-class and hands-on learning to my fingertips. … makes you feel like you are running a marketing campaign with real products.” — Jeffery P., Student
“The SEO Simternship provides great real-world experience in running ad campaigns and optimizing them for SEO.” Brad D., Student
Professors love Stukent’s Simternships, too: “I’ve had multiple students contact me post-graduation, saying that the Stukent simulation was a key factor in getting a job,” says Gregory Hoplamazian from Loyola University Maryland. “It gave them a conversation that few other students could have.”
An Easy-to-implement, Gradable Experience
Finally, Stukent Simternships give you an easy way to assess students’ growing skills. Our Simternships are auto-graded and provide students with individualized feedback, knowledge-checking interactions, and opportunities for self-reflection and peer review. Each Simternship gives you tools to evaluate your students’ progress, provide feedback and mentorship, and utilize the Simternship as a part of students’ final grades.
The Stukent Instructor Portal gives you your students’ results at a glance, and all Simternships integrate with popular LMS platforms such as Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, and more, which makes it easy to sync your students’ results with your gradebook. Best of all, Stukent Simternships are easy to implement in any classroom modality, whether your program is in-person, remote, or a hybrid of the two. Near or far, your students can all benefit from the use of a Simternship in the classroom!
Simternships are an easy way to engage your students in your course material like never before. Talk to a Stukent course consultant today to see how a Simternship can transform your curriculum!
At Stukent, we’re here to help educators help students help the world. To learn more about our revolutionary courseware and Simternships, or to get FREE instructor access to our products, visit our website.
