South African missile, unmanned air vehicle and space company Denel Dynamics held its annual intern project presentation at its main facility in Centurion, south of Pretoria, on Thursday. For some years now the company has designated young, newly recruited, engineers and technologists as interns during their first year of employment and has assigned these interns projects to develop, with the help of mentors and technology demonstrators. These projects serve to introduce the new recruits to the company’s ethos, capabilities and way of doing things.

“This programme is extremely valuable to Denel Dynamics,” said company deputy CEO Denise Wilson in her closing remarks at the event. “I know our interns have learned a lot during the past year.”

Whereas, in previous years, interns had been assigned one big project on which all were employed, in 2015 the interns were split up into separate teams which pursued separate, unrelated, projects. These projects were: development of a tactical observation ball system, development of an infrared dynamic scene generator, development of a discardable nose cone for the Umkhonto missile and development of improved shipping processes for the company’s shipping.

In addition, Spaceteq, the company’s Stellenbosch, Western Cape-based space unit, also ran an internship programme, to develop a three unit CubeSat (that is, a nano-satellite with dimensions of 10 cm x 10 cm x 30 cm; a one unit CubeSat is indeed a cube, measuring 10 cm in all three dimensions). But while the Centurion-based interns were granted budgets for their projects, the Spaceteq interns also had to raise their own funding! Because of this, the CubeSat project is being run over several years, with different interns working on it each year.

“The [internship] process is evolving,” Wilson told Engineering News Online. “We have to tailor it to what the business requires. What we want to do now is, without altering the intensity of the projects, to get the interns involved in Denel Dynamics projects earlier. It’s actually the way that we did it, when we were young engineers.”

“Spaceteq is a good example, where they [the interns] are working on space technologies that are the business of the company,” she pointed out. The CubeSat is intended for launch into space in due course, where it will execute real missions. “But you don’t want to set the goals too high and swamp them. That’s why we have a strong mentorship programme.”

While the demonstrators and systems developed by the interns may or may not lead to new products, the technologies involved are relevant to the company’s various development and production programmes. But the key thing is the experience obtained by the interns. “The knowledge gained is as important as the system itself,” she affirmed.