// Our commitment to those who served

The people who built this workforce should get to keep building it.

Defense Interns is a pipeline into contractors who hire veterans, and increasingly into contractors that veterans own. This page is what we commit to on both counts, and what we ask of the employers who join us.

// Where We Put The Work

Two commitments, both of them to employers.

A commitment that costs nothing to make is not one. These are the two we are held to, and the specific things we do to keep them.

// Commitment 01

A credentialed pipeline for contractors hiring veterans

Most of our host employers carry veteran hiring goals, whether from a federal contract clause, a corporate commitment, or the simple fact that the work suits people who have done it in uniform. The hard part is almost never willingness. It is finding candidates who already hold the certification the contract requires on the day the requisition opens.

We recruit through the veteran and military-affiliated student services offices at our partner institutions, not only through general career services.
Certification training is inside the program, so a candidate reaches an interview already holding the credential rather than promising to earn one.
Host employers see the full placement history of anybody who has rotated through, so a hiring decision is made on work you watched rather than on a resume.

// Commitment 02

Veteran-owned firms belong in the consortium

Service-disabled and veteran-owned small businesses win federal work and then run into the same wall every small firm runs into: an intern is only worth having if somebody has time to supervise one, and at fifteen people nobody does. The consortium exists precisely to carry the parts of that which do not have to be carried alone.

We are actively recruiting SDVOSB and VOSB contractors as host employers, at any size.
A firm with no HR department is not disqualified. What a host employer supplies is real work and a mentor with relevant experience.
Rotations are shared. A firm that can host for six months does not have to find twelve months of work to be useful to a student.

// What Hosting Actually Costs

A mentor and a desk

Four things a small firm does not have to do.

The reason a fifteen-person contractor turns down an intern is rarely the intern. It is everything around one. All of that sits with the program.

Certification training

Delivered through the program and its training partner. A host employer never has to fund or timetable it.

Selection and screening

Application, transcript, technical self-assessment and a structured interview happen before a student ever reaches your site.

Outcome tracking

Every graduate is followed for twelve months after completion. That reporting is ours, not yours.

The paperwork

Agreements, the placement record, reviews and the intern portal all live here. Hosting is a mentor and a desk.

Wondering which certifications a federal contract will actually accept? That is the next page over. Government and the 8570 / 8140 framework

// Host An Intern

If you own the firm, you already know the work.

Tell us what your team does and what you would want an intern working on. There is no minimum size and no requirement to hire at the end of it.

Become a host employer See where our graduates went