How can cultural employers best support student interns?
By: Cultural Institute
Tags: Diversity, Culture, Students, Internships, Careers

How can cultural employers best support student interns?

“There’s three tips that I have for cultural organisations who want to work students.

The first one being listen to them, support them, and treat them as equally as you would with another colleague who isn’t a student or an intern. I think if you’re open minded, you can really build a great relationship of mutual respect with them.

“The second one, I was really lucky to have a great team who cared about my skills and career development. They made it very clear to me that if there’s anything I was particularly interested in, or anything anybody was working on, to let them know and ask about it so I could get involved. I had the opportunity to get involved with loads of different things, including filming events, photography, and just making sure that I got the most out of the internship.

I think it’s really important to establish personal goals or find out any interests the students have, so that you can give them more meaningful tasks to do.

“The final one would be to try and be a mentor for them. What I mean by this is you have to be welcoming, willing, patient to teach them new things, and you have to consider that they might not have any prior experience in the cultural sector or your organisations.

“Sometimes this includes more than the obvious stuff. It could be stuff like how to present yourself, interpersonal communication, and I guess most have to do with like life skills that are transferable in both informal and formal environments.

I am most concerned about is the lack of workforce diversity shown by the annual surveys and reports. It’s not acceptable, and there tends to be little progress year-on-year.

“Organisations need to make a more active effort to listen to BAME groups, as well as other minority groups that are severely underrepresented. It’s not just about recognising there’s a problem, but it’s actually about putting change into action and doing something about it.

“Whether that’s getting consultation on how to improve diversity within your organisation, whether that’s creating more accessible schemes for minority groups or investing money, you need to be hiring people from minority groups at all levels of the organisation not just to tick a box.

“I think it’s absolutely crucial to arts and culture because it can only increase the opportunity for creativity and artistic collaborations. When you recognise talent from every single background, and enriches the arts, and in so many different areas of work and in different sectors. If you see yourself truly represented, you’re more inspired and confident to pursue those interests.”

See the full interview with Karyan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2KQBW_UJD8

How can we help?

As a university, we recognise there’s a lot more for us to do to increase diversity of the creative industries workforce. The University has recently published a new Access and Student Success strategy, and the Cultural Institute is working to ensure that opportunities to access the cultural sector are embedded into the University’s work.

The Cultural Institute aims to increase access to and diversity within the cultural sector by supporting progression routes for our students. Student opportunities include:

paid internships (either part-time during University terms, over summer, or year in industry placements)

in-curriculum placements which contribute to the student’s degree

volunteering opportunities

graduate recruitment opportunities.

By promoting and supporting student involvement with our cultural partners, we help students to develop valuable skills and experiences that enhance workforce diversity for cultural and arts organisations.

Help us to improve

However, we need to do more to support people who are not currently well-represented in the cultural sector to succeed meaningful,

We hope to better understand the barriers that the cultural sector is facing, through conversations with cultural employers and organisations.

Your valuable input will inform our work but also enable us to offer practical support and advice on inclusive recruitment and retention techniques. This will include practical support from our Careers Service widening participation specialists, and we can also connect you with young people from under-represented groups to discuss and promote your job opportunities.

If you would like to have a conversation about how we could support your organisation, please email student opportunities project manager Nichola Casse n.f.casse@leeds.ac.uk