Not because we don’t want to invest in young talent, but because, for us, a traditional internship is not the most logical way to support the next generation.

As part of the Estonian Marketing Association board, we set ourselves a goal around developing the next generation: every agency and company in the association should offer at least one internship opportunity a year. I think this could become an industry standard. Not an annoying box to tick, but a principle: every company should consciously contribute to developing the people who will become the next generation of our industry.

Because if we constantly talk about how difficult it is to find good strategists, project managers, copywriters, designers or marketers, it is worth asking where exactly we expect these people to come from.

They don’t just appear on the job market fully formed.

Someone has to give them their first real assignment. Someone has to let them make their first mistake. Someone has to shoot down their first idea. And when they finally do something genuinely good, someone has to explain why it was good.

At the same time, I think we too often define internships through one very specific model. A company posts an opening in spring, brings one or two young people into the office for the summer, gives them a laptop and a desk, and then spends three months trying to find the balance between what they can be trusted with and how to make sure mentoring them doesn’t burn out your best employee.

But that is not the only way to invest in the next generation.

For KAGU_the_agency, creating a traditional internship position would actually be a little absurd. The way we work simply isn’t built around having someone sit beside us for three months while we continuously find suitable tasks for them. If we did it just because “an agency should have an internship programme”, there is a good chance it wouldn’t ultimately benefit either the intern or us.

Our way of contributing is through teaching.

Like many others in the industry, I decided to teach. I teach young creative directors at university, and for me, that serves essentially the same purpose, just in a different format.

There, I can work with 20–40 future creatives at once. Give them real briefs. Make them solve problems, present their ideas, defend them, redo them and then have those ideas evaluated honestly.

We can talk not only about what a good idea looks like, but how you actually get to one. How to recognise when an idea is merely funny and when there is genuinely something in it. How to present an idea to a client. How to take criticism. How to recognise that one of your own favourite ideas simply doesn’t work in a business context. And how ambition is the foundation of everything.

Yes, at the end of the year we can’t say, “We have an amazing internship programme.”

But we can say that we contributed to the development of dozens of people.

And I think that is a much bigger contribution.

That is why, when we talk about internships, perhaps we should be a little less fixated on the word “internship” and spend a little more time thinking about what kinds of people we actually want to see joining our companies and our industry in the future.

If you are constantly short of good project managers, think about how you can help develop good project managers before they start playing with your clients’ budgets. If you want more strong strategists in the market, give young people an opportunity to actually put strategy into practice instead of only hearing about it in a lecture. If you think the level of junior copywriters is weak, maybe the solution isn’t just another job ad. Maybe one of the strong copywriters in our industry should go and teach them how to write.

All of this can be achieved through a traditional internship. But it could also mean mentoring. A university course. Job shadowing. A workshop for young talent. Or simply giving one young person the opportunity to be part of a real project from beginning to end.

The format can and should differ from agency to agency. What matters is that the contribution is real.

Sometimes I get the feeling that companies expect fully formed new talent to simply arrive on the market, while developing the next generation is seen as somebody else’s responsibility.

The university’s responsibility.

The young person’s own responsibility.

Another agency’s responsibility.

But if everyone is waiting for a ready-made person to join their team, then we are not really developing a new generation at all. We are simply trying to poach each other’s semi-senior employees. That is why I like the idea that at least one internship opportunity a year should become the norm among Estonian Marketing Association members.

Not necessarily one traditional internship position, but one deliberate contribution that gives someone the opportunity to enter our industry and get better at what they do. At least once a year, every company could ask itself: What kind of people do we want to see more of in this industry five years from now — and what can we do ourselves to help make that happen?

Gunnar Hunt, co-founder of KAGU_the_agency and lecturer at Tallinn University.

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