Coaching interns — three applied-development trajectories

Over a period of about a year and a half I coached three applied-development trajectories from a higher-education school for one of my clients. That client did not have the in-house technical knowledge to coach a group of HBO ICT interns themselves — a common situation for companies with interesting challenges but no senior engineers on staff.

An applied-development trajectory is set up beautifully: students get a real-world assignment and have to deliver a working solution as a team within a few months, including written justification. For the students this is a big step into professional practice; for the client a valuable but fragile form of capacity. The coach's role is to bring those two interests together.

Substantively the teams worked on two recurring themes: integrating phone-based authentication into a mobile application, and implementing and building video-conferencing functionality. Both topics are rich enough to be genuinely challenging, yet concrete enough to lead to results within a single trajectory.

My approach followed the same line each time: in the first weeks mainly help bring structure and scope, then step by step put more ownership on the team. A lot of the coaching wasn't 'give the right answer' but 'ask the right question' — about choices, alternatives, and consequences — so students learn to argue decisions instead of guessing them.

Part of that was honest conversation about what's going well and what could be better. A team that only gets compliments learns little; a team that only gets criticism collapses. The balance between those — aimed at the right person at the right moment — turned out to be at least as important as anything technical.

What I got out of it myself was significant. Coaching forces you to make your own assumptions explicit and confronts you with the spots where your intuition has long since started carrying you forward but is still invisible to a beginner. That has lastingly sharpened me as an architect and consultant in how I work and how I transfer knowledge.