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Revolutionizing internships at IBM

June 26, 2003

After five years of vigorous growth, successful projects and high praise, Extreme Blue™ is inspiring what could be the vanguard of the next evolution of IBM university talent programs. Team-based, project-focused internships, adopting many of the Extreme Blue program's most successful aspects, were launched this summer at five U.S. research and development labs.

In Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Rochester, Minn., Boulder, Colo., Tucson, Ariz., and Beaverton, Ore., technical students are working in small teams with MBA interns or IBM business and technical resources on 10 high-impact, short-term projects. These internships follow the Extreme Blue program best practices in the areas of recruiting, project work, career development and teamwork.

"This is really about turbo-charging and scaling project-focused summer internships at IBM," explains Jane Harper, director of University Talent Programs. "There's an overwhelming demand to take some of the best attributes of the Extreme Blue program and revolutionize recruitment and program design to maximize the experience for both interns and IBM."

These internships mimic the Extreme Blue program's fusion of business and technology, with interns working on all sides of their projects, technically innovating against a backdrop of business value and market considerations.

Highly concentrated in focus, internship endeavors have concrete endpoints and are designed to produce specific deliverables upon completion. Interns are recruited to fill specific slots on specific projects, a type of need-based talent selection pioneered by the Extreme Blue program.

Career development, another Extreme Blue hallmark, earns high priority in the new internships. Executive visits are frequent as top IBM managers speak to and meet with participants at the internships' outset, conclusion, and at roundtables throughout the summer.

Envisioning collaboration as crucial to summer success, the new internships, like the Extreme Blue program, place special emphasis on teamwork, employing group projects, collective responsibilities and team-building activities to foster a cooperative atmosphere.

This approach, if successful, will spread to IBM labs across the globe, accelerating high-performance culture and technology innovation.

"There are many IBM labs that require short-term, project-focused teams to generate high-impact results," says Harper. "Over time, IBM might have hundreds of these team-based projects running on demand in our labs across the globe."