Creating a successful experience for yourself, your learners, and the companies involves following some best practices to ensure that the experience captures your own learning objectives for your learners, and that it is also appealing companies and their projects.

Here are some best practices and insights into what makes a great experience.

Your experience describes to employers what learners are capable of and why they should be interested in working with them. Avoid using jargon or language that is geared towards an academic audience.

State clearly why companies could benefit from participating. Employers sign up for different reasons: to recruit learners to future roles in their organization, to create positive brand awareness, to gain insights about business challenges, etc.. Your experience should relay how this opportunity can help them meet goals in the subject matter your learners are studying.

If you need companies to be able to provide certain types of internal data, to make a specific time commitment, or to fit certain parameters (size, type, etc.), make sure to include this information in the company requirements. You do not want to receive projects from companies who will not be able to meet the minimum requirements.

Companies provide better projects if they are given concrete examples. Avoid being too general, providing detailed examples will give companies a better idea of learner capabilities, and attract higher quality projects.

If your ideal projects are very narrowly defined, you may have trouble finding the right ones. Being open to companies of different sizes and types, and providing 3-5 different project examples that fit your subject area will help you attract the best projects which can also be modified to meet any specific needs you have.

Ultimately, it is important that the experience meets the learning outcomes for your learners, but this should be balanced with the need to attract applications from companies.

Companies may have requirements for projects ranging all possible skill levels of learners. They are not expecting industry professional level work.

For more junior learners, educators may want to have multiple teams of learners work on a single project. Then, only the top project submission may be shared with the company. This is a great proposition for companies, and an entry point for learners into experiential learning with a real client.

Most projects can work for any program size.

In large programs, it likely will not be feasible for every learner team to work with a unique project. For these cases, many teams should work on a single project. To keep things manageable for the company, communication should go through the educator, or a lead contact selected from the learners. The company may wish to have regular project check-ins with all team leads present in order to reduce the channels of communication.