Young interns

About ten days ago, I took part in the signing of a partnership agreement between the MEDEF, with its president Patrick Martin (yeah, him), and the Association des Parents d’Elèves de l’Enseignement libre (APEL). The aim of this partnership is to bring students’ parents closer to the world of business, and therefore the children. Obviously this echoes the opening of mandatory internships (?*) in seconde, the first year of French high school, announced last week by the Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal.

Why was I there?

We’ve been MEDEF members for a short while, because we think a wind of something new is building (the energy transition, work-life balance, AI, and I’ll spare you the rest) and why not go see what’s happening on the side of our fellow company owners. All the more so since it lets us run into people who aren’t from our world, but who, we’re sure, are living through the same things we are.

I was presenting the things we do at Coddity to make our jobs known to younger people, and in particular the program we’re setting up to host interns from troisième, the last year of middle school.

If we set aside my opinion on AI (see my previous posts), the main problem in our sector is the shortage (I’m also setting aside the ego of the people who work in it), and in second place, the very low proportion of women.

Cake shortage

So how do we go about tackling these 2 problems? For a company like ours, growth comes from hiring. We have to recruit from the others, or be the best at attracting the best people coming out of engineering school. Our sector is like the Paris real estate market, a cake of a fairly fixed size, so to get your fill you have to eat (part of) someone else’s slice. That’s the short-term solution. But what remains simplest is obviously to bake a bigger cake (yes, still like Paris — 50-story towers would solve the housing problem in this city).

But how do you produce a bigger cake in the hiring of engineers? You’ve understood: it’s by going to the source, planting seeds in the brains of 13/14-year-olds and getting them to picture themselves in a sector / a job.

And that’s where the troisième internships come in.

Let’s say it straight away: these internships are a very good thing. But like any good idea, if it’s badly executed, it’s counterproductive. These internships are an excellent way to introduce the professional world, but they require a substantial effort from companies so that the experience isn’t a disappointment.

Three-legged stool internships

We’ve “industrialized” our internships, basing them on an observation / making / interview triptych. This triptych aims not only to make our jobs known, but also to build a communication bridge between the company and young people, which is already a problem. They normally have no direct contact with the professional world before they enter higher education, with the exception of seasonal contracts and apprenticeships (where you leave the education system) and of whatever their parents or their teachers can or want to say about it. And, obviously, that creates an accessibility problem depending on the background they come from. And we’re not even talking about the internship itself, just about finding one!

Back to our stool, here’s the detail of this triptych.

Observation: the shortest phase possible, because we do an “intellectual” job. If you tell a 14-year-old to watch a developer work, so much for the goal of “getting the kid interested” ^^.

Making: after an initial day of learning the basics of development, we propose building a small bit of code, something simple and accessible, but which will do 2 things. The first is the feeling of pride at having produced something with their own hands (and their own brain). The second is that they’re going to run into problems, and that they’re going to turn to the people who can help them, meaning the members of our team. This is where the shift happens: there is an exchange.

Interview: we organize 3 interviews with 3 employees of the company, from 3 different jobs. The exchange is made much easier, because the communication barrier has been broken thanks to the Making phase, where the young person has already been able to talk with several adults to solve their problems. The exchange is about the job, the studies, and the path, … A very simple exchange, the way you’d have one with a cousin.

Our great pride is still the change over 1 week: on Monday morning we welcome a kid who barely says hello (a teenager, what do you expect), and at the end of the week, someone integrated into the team who says goodbye by name. Great success \o/ (spoiler: it still doesn’t work every time).

Collective investment

We think it’s important for a company to get involved as early as possible in the educational path. Getting the young people of an age group interested, spending time presenting our jobs, our sectors, must not be done so you can make a pretty LinkedIn post branded CSR. It’s an investment in the long-term collective future.

Take our sector, self-named “tech”. Everyone complains about the lack of women and about their place in this sector. But if we don’t go into middle schools to talk about it and promote it, how are the vocations going to be born? We can stack up the posts, the conventions, the Meetups; we’re not going to pull thousands of young women out of the ground on demand like that!

Personal anecdote. While appearing before a jury to obtain a CSR label, an elected official from a local authority asks me what we do to guarantee parity in the company. He was a bit thrown (not many Scrabble points) by my very pragmatic answer: “I’m happy to hire some, but there aren’t any. Imposing 50% is simply asking me to cut my headcount by a factor of 3 and shut my company. But if you can bring 50,000 more women engineers onto the job market, I’ll take them. You’ll have your parity.”

I’d read that the new nuclear deployment plan was going to require 10,000 new nuclear engineers per year (the result of 20 years of underinvestment, the product of politicians’ choices). That number represents ¼ of the engineers trained per year in France. I hope some “talent acquisition managers” and “nuclear engineering advocate” are doing the rounds of the middle schools and high schools of France to spark vocations!

Conclusion

Through the troisième internships we organize at Coddity, we seek to concretely address the challenges of our industry, notably the talent shortage and the lack of gender diversity.

Our approach is simple: by familiarizing young people with our jobs from middle school on, we hope to spark interests and vocations. It isn’t a matter of looking good or of “scoring points” on CSR, but of responding effectively to a sectoral need. By involving young people in a tangible way, we create a real opportunity for them to discover technology careers and commit to them.

This is a reflection on how we can, as a company, contribute meaningfully to the career guidance of young people. It means listening, adapting our methods (it’s also on us to adapt to young people, because they already have to get to grips with the codes of the working world) and staying open to the new ideas and perspectives they bring.

You’ve understood: it’s a considered choice, guided by the obligation/desire to bring a practical solution to some of the most pressing issues in our sector. There are 35 of us at Coddity, and we manage to take in about ten interns a year, so we encourage every company, of every size, to do it!