The Greater Louisville Interns program, part of the Graduate! Greater Louisville endeavor is designed to
encourage students who will be graduating in the near future to remain in the region and forge
relationships with local employers. The students can help to breathe new life into the current
economy and will create a vibrant future for the community.
Graduate! Greater Louisville is a regional, bi-state, community-wide effort to increase the importance
of post-secondary education and to increase enrollment for colleges and universities. The core of the
marketing campaign will focus on directly relating higher education attainment levels to better quality
of life.
Why Now?
The Greater Louisville region has been lax at nurturing the future workforce that it is developing within
the local college and university system. Through the retention of these graduates, we can not only offer
the workforce that current companies desire, but we will also be able to use this to relocate new business
into the area. At the same time, through fostering the relationship between these students and the
community, we will be able to support the future entrepreneurs of our region.
The Plan
Through the implementation of GLI and HIRE, a higher education forum, Greater Louisville Interns has been
created to retain the students we educate locally through a series of channels:
- Endorsing the career path of education - internship - career opportunities for graduates and future graduates;
- Creating a means to connect employers with students in order to promote the cultivation of our future workforce;
- Developing a website in order to match students with employers to create the most prosperous internship opportunities;
- Offering career development workshops for students in order to allow them the best possible benefit from their internship;
- Hosting workshops for employers in an effort to relay the importance of the internship in the workplace;
- Designing a program to allow each intern to mentor with an executive in their chosen career path.
The Program
Greater Louisville Interns will include several tactics to achieve its goals, including:
- Creating an internship website, GreaterLouisvilleInterns.com that will be able to offer helpful tips to both students and employers, as well as provide the initial contact between these two groups.
- Developing an Employer Guidebook that will take the employer through each and every step of designing their own personal internship program.
- Hosting special events such as workshops and mentoring programs to enhance the internship experience.
- Creating 200 internship opportunities the first year, with more opportunities in the future.
- Offering an outlet for networking opportunities between students and executives in the community.
