South African missile, unmanned air vehicle and space technology company Denel Dynamics has determined that an innovation in its annual engineering internship programme, introduced last year, was a great success. This was the purposeful use of young engineers, as well as older staff, as mentors (2013 was the fifth year the company has run the programme, which is seen as important for its future success).

“The importance of the intern programme is that we’re working in a very high-tech environment and we want to make sure that when our new engineers start working they can deliver on expected outputs and meet the standards of the company,” affirmed Denel Dynamics CEO Tsepo Monaheng. “We want to make sure that the culture of the company is transferred to them in their first year, so that when they get to programmes, we know they can deliver. Once they’re on programmes, there is no time to groom them. This [intern project] is the first time in their lives that they have, working from paper through processes, delivered a product.”

“For last year’s programme, for the first time as part of a purposeful strategy, some of the mentors were the previous year’s interns, now working in the company as young engineers. This has worked incredibly well,” explained Denel Dynamics Engineering Academy of Learning manager Shahen Naidoo. “Part of the difficulties interns have is the technology, but part is adjusting to the company. And the previous year’s interns have been through this.” They thus complemented the older mentors who have greater engineering, technological and organisational experience.

As a result, he hoped that some of the 2013 intern class will volunteer as mentors for the 2014 interns, and that some of the 2012 intern will join their older colleagues and mentor again. Mentoring at Denel Dynamics is purely voluntary. “There are two parts to the success of this programme: the inherent talent of the interns, which we need to nurture, and the mentors willing to transfer their knowledge and skills – they get no extrinsic reward.”

Each year, the interns are given a product to develop. For 2013, they had to develop an intelligent grenade system, comprising an intelligent grenade launcher firing intelligent grenades. Key requirements to be met included the grenade being able to change course in flight and hit a 0.5 m × 0.5 m window, offset from the weapon’s original trajectory, in five shots or less. The interns could not use compressed gas or pyrotechnics to power the launcher or propel the grenade.

This programme served to expose the interns to systems development, and teach them how to develop a project from design, through documentation, assembly, testing and demonstration. The interns have developed a technology demonstrator comprising a spring-powered launcher and a winged and steerable grenade. They have proceeded through all the stages up to and including demonstration.

The result will not make a practical weapon at this stage of development, but that was not the point. “For me, the real product is the people coming out of the academy,” affirmed Naidoo. “We have fast-tracked their experience to prepare them to become productive in a very short space of time. The programme has been highly successful in 2013 again.”

Last year’s intern class started out with 17 people; one resigned and left the company, two went to the University of Oxford to study for PhDs, and one was sent by the company to Antarctica with a South African National Space Agency team as part of Denel Dynamics’ developing space business. As a result, the programme was completed by 13 interns.