From intern to strategic talent: strengthening mentoring capacity

Since September 2023, a national placement office has been established within the police. The initial focus was to get direction, centralize and have the basics in order. This has now been achieved and nice steps have already been made towards further development. (onboarding day interns, expansion with work-study program, set up inspiration day internship supervisors). The internship office emerged from the labor market strategy with the goal of focusing on scarce profiles.

The biggest challenge remains that there are many students at the gate, but the number of spots and mentoring capacity are not sufficient to provide these benevolent students with internships. In other words, we are dealing with the reverse labor market here.

We started in 2023 with 1,000 trainees a year and now we are around 1,200 trainees a year. By the way, it is not that this is an increase in absolute numbers. We would like to realize a quality change, that people think about the scarce profiles and translate this into the right internships so that we can attract the high potentials to us who can fill our vacancies in the (medium to longer term).

Two central questions we can ask is:
- In a large and complex organization that is already facing staffing shortages, how do you ensure that people make time for mentoring an intern?
- How do we create a movement where people start thinking from their own needs?