Update Feb. 29 corrects intern Ceri Verble's name

At first glance, there's nothing unusual about Ben Griswold's workday routine.

He analyzes markets, crafts investment strategies and performs various other responsibilities assigned him by Kennedy Capital Management, a boutique Creve Coeur financial services firm.

All fairly normal in finance, were it not for this: Griswold is an intern.

The hand-wringing over brain drain that siphons St. Louis's brightest young graduates from St. Louis to New York, Chicago or San Francisco has gnarled a fair share of economic development knuckles in these precincts.

But there may be an antidote: Long-term, paid internship programs offered by Kennedy Capital and its larger counterpart, Town & Country-based Scottrade. Both businesses provide college students with far more than a single semester or a summer break to absorb the intricacies of the trade - and both often convert interns to permanent staffers.

Companies that offer extended internships are the exception rather than the rule, said Peggy Gilbertson, intern coordinator at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

But the role of interns, she added, has thankfully evolved whether a college student is on the job for three months or three years.

"I'm definitely part of a team," said UMSL student Ceri Verble, an intern in the Scottrade public relations department. "I sit in team meetings and my ideas are heard. I'm not intimidated."

The interns at both Kennedy Capital (14) and Scottrade (428 in company branches nationwide) shatter the stereotype of coffee-fetching college interns.

"I'd be embarrassed to ask our interns" to make coffee, said Caroline Dybala, the internship program manager at Scottrade.

Basic economics guided Kennedy Capital co-founder Jerry Kennedy's decision 20 years ago to hire interns for terms as long as 36 months.

From a business perspective, it makes little sense to show interns the door just as they were getting comfortable with the quotidian of institutional finance.

"There's a lot to learn at the start," said Alex Mosman, the manager of the intern cooperative learning program. "And if you only had a summer or a semester, you'd learn the basics and then leave."

A fair number of the 185 sophomores and juniors hired by Kennedy Capital over the last two decades - often from UMSL, St. Louis University and Washington University - have in fact stuck around a lot more than three years.

Indeed, about a quarter of the full-time employees at the company's Olive Boulevard headquarters are former interns -- Mosman and the firm's chief financial officer included.

The same is true at Scottrade, which moves between 50-60 percent of its interns into permanent posts.

Scottrade launched its extended length internship to accommodate job growth at its network of branch offices.

Dybala knows first hand the benefit of the long-term internship.

She arrived as a Scottrade intern in 2000 with a goal of working in human resources, but uncertain about how she might fit into the field.

Her six months at Scottrade clarified the picture and paved the way for Dybala's current position.

By encouraging college students to stay on the job longer, the Scottrade and Kennedy Capital programs support to the notion that an investment in the personal and professional of young employees is an investment in the community as well.

Kennedy Capital in fact estimates that at least 60 percent of its former interns have remained in St. Louis. (The numbers for Scottrade are more difficult to track because its interns are scattered around the country.)

The first three months that former intern Alex Mosman spent at Kennedy Capital as 20-hour-a-week intern may have been "overwhelming." But he attributes a big part of steep learning curve to his invaluable interaction with the top company executives.

"You're thrown into it right away," said Mosman, now a full-time research associate and the manager of the firm's intern cooperative learning program. "You're sitting in on management meetings and having conversations with the (chief financial officer)."

Griswold's tenure as a Kennedy Management intern will earn him him a valuable entry for the resume he'll send to prospective employers following graduation next year from SLU, with a bachelor's degree in finance and a graduate degree in accounting.

As the head intern, charged with coordinating the schedules of seven fellow undergrads in the finance department, Griswold will bring supervisory experience to his first job out of college.

"I'm not saying I was a 100 percent proficient from day one. But I communicate here constantly with professionals, and I won't miss a beat wherever I go," Griswold said.

The reluctance of companies large and small to hire untested graduates straight of college has long-since turned real-world internships into a pre-requisite for full-time employment.

The question facing St. Louis businesses is whether to make worthwhile internships available locally -- or open the door for top-drawer college students to look elsewhere.

For the answer, the local business community might want to consult Alex Mosman.

"You can leave St. Louis and take an internship somewhere else," said Mosman. "But if you do that, you may be gone for good."

 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Don't just always go out to lunch with, you know, a couple of your friends, but actually go out to lunch with people from other departments, from other companies, and explicitly address questions like, how do you see the industry changing? How do you do your job effectively? Is there anything I should learn from that in terms of how do I do my job effectively? Do you see interesting opportunities? And that's not necessarily always a question of job transition. It can be. Those kinds of talking to other people, building those relationships, are, I think, the things that everyone needs to be doing." - Reid Hoffman, co-author of LinkedIn and author of The Start-up of You.

Source: National Public Radio's Morning Edition

BY THE NUMBERS

43 - Percentage of hiring managers who expressed concern that the top talent in their organizations will voluntarily depart for other positions in 2012.

Source: Harris/CareerBuilder survey

FINAL WORD

"You know, it's funny. I bet someone is going to listen to this and say, you know, if I went in to my boss at my workplace, and said, you know, I went out to lunch with this guy from another division, or another company entirely, and came up with this interesting idea, that they would say my boss doesn't want to hear that." - Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep's response to Reid Hoffman's observation.

"Well, then your boss is not really adapting to the modern world." - Reid Hoffman

Source: National Public Radio's Morning Edition