Recently approved and good news for the areas of Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, Cambridge and Hamilton, University of Waterloo is now the delivery agency on behalf of Industry Canada for an internship program to promote the hiring of post-secondary graduates from local colleges and universities. U of Waterloo is now accepting applications for the 2010/2011 Small Business Internship Program to support the development of e-business initiatives and Career Focus. You can access the application and guidelines from Application Form for SBIP.
To encourage Businesses to take advantage of the possibilities offered by e-business, the Small Business Internship Program has been extended to run from April 2010 to March 2011. The SBIP seeks to improve the competitiveness of SMEs by supporting businesses to actively market on-line and improve their competitiveness with e-business practices and technologies.
Through Government of Canada, a corporation or sole proprietary may receive up to 75% of wages up to a total of $10,000. The internship would apply to a recently graduated student within a post-secondary education program in e-business and/or an ICT related field, which may include any field where ICT knowledge and skills such as computer sciences, media design, business, and engineering. The internship must give the grad full-time work for a total of 420 hours over a 12 week period. The grad must be under the age of 31 years to be eligible for this program.
Eligible Criteria for Funding:
- projects must enhance the businesses e-capability
- e-business marketing such as emailing, blogging, podcasting, viral marketing, etc
- enhancement of social media tools
- development and execution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy with the correct keywords and link building strategies
This is a great program and examples of project ideas can be reviewed at Eligible Programs or Marketing Activities for SBIP. Follow the links on this and other hiring mechanisms on my blogroll – but the projects that are eligible for graduate hire is geared to your website and e-business. Getting your site rankings improved, improve conversion traffic from website, press releases and building stronger content on your web by hiring a software engineering student from a local college/universities.
This program is easily accessible for many business owners in the region. U of Waterloo is the delivering agency for this area; Industry Canada has provided the additional funds to March 31, 2011.