What makes an internship worth it for your intern is evidence: one finished piece of work they can name, show and explain to the next person who interviews them. Our advice is to choose that piece in the first week and then protect it, because the rest of the summer will eat it.
It is week three, your intern has finished what you asked for and is sitting there waiting, and the work that genuinely needs doing is work only you know how to do. The instinct then is to invent a project, and the better move is to look at what they have already worked on.
What should I have my intern do all day?
Give them one piece of work they will complete, and let the rest of their days fill in around it. A task is something you hand over and forget. A piece of work is something that did not exist in June and does exist in August, with a name and somebody who made it. Pick something small enough to finish in the weeks you have, and real enough that you would have had to do it yourself eventually.
The intern’s next employer really asks only one question: “what did you do at your previous firm?”, and they don’t want to listen to a list of disconnected errands.
My intern just does busy work and I know it
Busy work becomes a problem only when it leaves no trace behind it. Filing two years of invoices is useful to you, and an intern can describe it for the rest of their working life – provided that at the end there is a system somebody else can use and a half page explaining it.
| Work that disappears | The same work, done so something survives |
| Answering the phone for three months | Answering it, and building a one-page list of the ten questions customers ask most |
| Filing two years of invoices | Filing them, then writing the half page that explains the new order |
| Tinkering with your social media accounts | Running one campaign start to finish, with the numbers from before and after |
How do I train an intern when I do not have time to train anybody?
Our advice is to stop thinking of it as training and let them shadow you instead. A twenty-two-year-old at a large company sits four levels away from anyone who makes any real decision at the firm, and at your business the person who decides everything is three feet away. The cost to you is fifteen minutes a week, spent saying out loud why you quoted that job at the number you did.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 63.1 percent of the 2024-25 intern class converted into full-time hires, the highest figure in five years. Conversion measures whether somebody learned enough about a business to be worth keeping, and closeness is how they learn it.
Frequently asked questions
Is it worth hiring an intern for a small business? It is worth it when you already know the one job you want finished, and much less so when you are hoping an extra pair of hands will reveal what they should be doing.
What do I do when my intern has nothing to do? Ask them what they have noticed that seems broken, then let them fix one of those things. Newcomers see the awkwardness in a business for about six weeks before they stop noticing it.
How do I write a recommendation letter when my intern did not do very much? Write it about the one specific thing, however small, and describe what it changed. A letter saying they rebuilt your customer email sequence and the reply rate went up convinces more than three paragraphs about attitude.
The bottom line
An internship is worth it to the intern when they leave holding something they made, and worth it to you when the thing they made is something you needed. Both halves come from one decision, taken in the first week. At Sigma Growth Specialists we spend most of our time on the grown-up version of that question, which is how work gets defined clearly enough that somebody other than the founder can finish it.
