Leveraging Design Thinking for Crafting Meaningful Internship Experiences
2:10 PM – 3:00 PM • 50 Minute Runtime • Room 226
Design thinking is a cutting-edge management approach that focuses on crafting an employee experience centered around employees’ needs, values, and aspirations (Mazor, 2018). Central to this approach is the notion that satisfied employees tend to be more aligned with the goals and missions of the organization where they are employed (Manning et al., 2012). While design thinking has been posed as a management strategy in private (Mazor, 2018) and educational settings (Tran & Smith, 2020), there are limited examples of design thinking being used to construct internship experiences. This feels like a missed opportunity given that employers use internships as a recruitment mechanism (National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], 2023). As the war for talent intensifies, inclusive talent management scholars have argued that strategies such as design thinking provide an opportunity to simultaneously strengthen organizational assets by recruiting top-end talent and to more fully humanize the workforce by focusing on employee needs (Morgan, 2017; Tran, 2022). To this point, design thinking has been underutilized in crafting internships. This session aims to provide a brief overview of design thinking, describe the aptitude of applying design thinking to internships, and facilitate a dialogue between practitioners and scholars centered on the possibilities of leveraging design thinking when crafting internships. Ultimately, by applying design thinking to internships, this session aims to advance more socially just student internship experiences.
Zach Jenkins
Director of Workforce Development • University of South Carolina
Brittany Sutton
University of South Carolina • Public Health Practice Associate