LifeWork has worked with interns for a number of years now, and the return on that investment goes both directions. We teach them how to be good teammates, how to operate in a business environment instead of an academic one, how to turn coursework instincts into working habits. What they bring back is less obvious, but arguably just as valuable: a habit of asking basic, probing questions that force a team back to fundamentals.
The Question That Resets a Room
Every established process eventually stops being questioned. Not because it's necessarily wrong, but because everyone doing it already knows the steps well enough that asking why stops occurring to anyone. That's where an intern's question lands differently. They aren't burdened by months or years of "this is just how it's done here." When they ask why a step exists, the room has exactly two honest answers: a real reason, or the quiet realization that there isn't one anymore.
Both answers are valuable. A real reason, said out loud, reinforces that the process is sound and gives the intern (and everyone else in the room) a clearer understanding of why it matters. The absence of a reason is often more valuable still, because it's the first sign that a process has drifted from its original purpose and is worth re-examining. Either way, the question moves something forward. That's a genuine innovation engine, not just a pleasant byproduct of having young people around.
Fresh Eyes, Old Assumptions
The value here isn't that interns are smarter or more insightful than an experienced team. It's that they're looking at the actual current state of a process, not the story a team has been telling itself about that process for years. Those two things drift apart slowly and quietly, and by the time they've drifted far enough to matter, almost nobody on the inside can see the gap anymore. An outside, unburdened set of eyes can.
The Other Half of the Equation: Building Mentors
Developing students is only half of what this relationship builds. The other half, easy to overlook, is developing mentors. Mentoring is a skill, not something that shows up automatically the moment someone gets enough years of experience. If anything, the opposite tends to happen. The deeper someone's expertise gets, the more of the early steps disappear from how they explain it, not because they're withholding anything, but because those steps became automatic so long ago that it's easy to forget they were ever hard.
Too many people become too internalized in their own expertise and stop making time to truly explain it. Good mentoring is the deliberate correction to that drift: making the implicit explicit, on purpose, for someone who hasn't automated it yet. That's worth teaching and promoting as its own capability, not assuming every senior person already has it.
What Mentoring Actually Builds
Mentoring relationships shape more than a single intern's semester. They shape the kind of leader an emerging professional becomes: outward thinking instead of self focused, participative instead of directive by default, instructive instead of assuming things will be picked up by osmosis, and genuinely caring about the person on the other side of the relationship. That's the kind of leader everyone deserves to work for eventually, and it doesn't appear by accident.
The outcomes an organization builds with an intern create capacity almost immediately. Less visible, but just as real, is what mentoring builds in the mentor. The hour spent explaining something clearly today comes back later, in a stronger team, a more capable successor, a habit of leadership that outlasts any single relationship. It's a fairly literal case of sowing the seeds of prosperity: the return isn't always immediate, but it compounds.
Expanding Who We Mentor: SkillBridge
That same commitment is what's carrying LifeWork toward a new chapter. The Department of Defense's SkillBridge program allows transitioning service members, in their final 180 days of active duty, to gain civilian work experience with an approved employer while still receiving full military pay and benefits. It's built specifically to close the gap between a strong military record and the civilian credentials and work history most employers screen for. Approval to host service members requires an active agreement with the Department of Defense, and that approval is not automatic.
LifeWork is approaching its three year mark, the threshold that will qualify us to formally mentor soldiers as an organization through SkillBridge. The parallel to our internship program is not subtle, and we don't think it should be. A transitioning soldier stepping into a civilian workplace for the first time is navigating much of what a student intern navigates: a new environment, new norms, deep and hard won experience that hasn't yet been translated into a new context. That transition deserves the same deliberate mentoring we've spent years building into our culture, not an improvised version of it.
Helping students and transitioning soldiers reach their ideal career state is a goal we will never give up on. It's the same goal from two directions: build honest capability, mentor it deliberately, and let the questions that come from fresh eyes keep sending everyone back to first principles.
Where Life comes before Work
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Transition to Civilian Life: Better Collection and Analysis of Military Service Data Needed to Improve Oversight of the SkillBridge Program, and U.S. Department of Defense SkillBridge program guidance.