4 killing Behaviors of Interns!

Before I settled at my current job at the finance department, Palestinian telecommunication, I had the chance to do three internships both paid and unpaid. At that point, I used to judge the employees (trainers) based on  how they should train  and deal with interns. When I sat on the other side of the table and I became the employee, no doubt, it was totally different experience.  I started to understand why such actions have been provocative to the employee. From my experience as a trainer, the interns usually conduct irrational behaviors. For that reason, I thought I should devote sometime to summarize the most critical behaviors that we face in the finance department:

1.    College Books Are The Ultimate Right.

We exert tremendous efforts to teach interns that the college books are right, but also, there are other methods and approaches that are right too. This is the real world; this is not  college where marks are the only evaluation tool. Now, it is the place where our approach is entitled as" All roads lead to Rome"

2.    They know Zilch About Communication Skills

We hold ourselves back from negatively reacting to the actions of the interns. Ironically, they still think, dress, talk, and behave, as if they are still students. They forgot that after 2-5 months they would be released to the real world.

3.    Unnecessary Details. 

The interns assume that in a few days, they are going to  master everything in the finance department. Of course, they will not. From my experience, we should emphasize on the general and broad aspects of the business and try to connect that with their college books. For example, we are recording on the Oracle finance program. In the training, I will not focus on the accounts and the recording on the program. I will only focus on the recording process and the fundamentals; for two prominent reasons:

1. The chart of accounts contains hundreds of accounts. No time for that!!

2. The program and accounts are only designed for our company, if they will work for other companies, it will not add up that much of knowledge to them. However, the recording process will do so since it is going to be very similar.

4.     Immature questions:

I still remember an intern asked my colleague "How much is your Salary?"  They can be smarter and say" what is the salary scale for entry level accountants?"

Please be aware of that if you want to become a trainee.  That is why we encourage every student to look for internships so they can be prepared  for the crucial market.

Let's hear from you now, did you face something similar  at your workplace?