I aim to  promote an inclusive culture in my organisation. I have a focus on promoting cross-generational working. We welcome student interns as staff, and while not all students are young, they do tend to lower the average age about the place.

I am delighted to have such a great group of interns who work with us in Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW) all year, across all of our teams and projects.

Currently we host around 40 interns. In the summer we will add around 20 more.

I am pleased to see we will have new interns looking at AI in L&D, Green Web Estate, VLE Excellence, Web Migration, Accessibility, Training and Events and Communications.

All our internships are paid. We aim to support students at times of rising living costs by providing high quality work experience opportunities which will offer them a head start into digital jobs in the future.

The 2024 summer internship adverts are live on Unitemps: University of Edinburgh Jobs – Unitemps

Every year we take a snapshot of accessibility in our VLE. Over the summer 3,508 documents across 1,441 courses from across the University were reviewed against a defined selection of accessibility criteria by our excellent team of interns. The results were encouraging:

87.6% of documents reviewed were named appropriately (i.e. so that users can anticipate the contents in advance of opening the files)
Within the documents checked, 74.4% used a more accessible font (sans serif)
80.7% of documents were justified/aligned in a way that supports more users (i.e. not centre or fully justified)
Italics text is harder for some people to read in blocks, and 89.4% of documents contained no blocks of italics. The same counts for blocks of capital letters, and a whopping 97.9% of documents contained no blocks of capital letters.

Well done to all at University of Edinburgh who are changing their practice to be more inclusive.

I aim to  promote an inclusive culture in my organisation. I have a focus on promoting cross-generational working. We welcome student interns as staff, and while not all students are young, they do tend to lower the average age about the place.

I am delighted to have such a great group of interns who will work with us all year across all of our teams and projects.

Joining our two Napier Web Development Interns (who work with us full-time) and our Web Governance Intern ( who has been with us for ages), we also have this year: a Digital Content Training Research Intern, a  Digital Marketing Intern, a Diversity Recruitment and Attraction Intern,  a Media Administration Intern, an Edtech Operations Intern, a Design System and Web Media Intern, a Nudge Intern, a Student Notifications Service Software Developer Intern, a User Research Intern,  2 Digital Learning Interns,  7 Learn Foundations Interns, 4 Web Content Migration Liaison Assistants and a Digital Skills Trainer – Coding Intern!

I will also be having regular ‘Heads Learn from Interns’ session where the LTW senior management team will hear recommendations and advice from the interns, based on their insights and expertise.

And yes, many of our interns do stay, or return and have careers with us after they graduate.