Successful X-Labs work-based learning program seeks to scale

For nearly two years, JMU X-Labs has partnered with higher education tech company Ellucian on their inaugural brainchild, the X-Labs Reimagined Internship. Now having seen several successful outcomes from the program, X-Labs is looking to expand its reach by partnering with additional companies.

Recently meeting at Ellucian headquarters in Reston, Virginia, to host a visioning session for interested employers, leadership from the X-Labs team, JMU Corporate and Foundation Relations, and the Office of Research, Economic Development and Innovation met to share their success story.

“When we say we’re reimagining internships, this is not a unique situation where X-Labs is trying something new for the first time,” said Dr. Connie Frigo, X-Labs executive director. “X-Labs exists to innovate, which means we are piloting programs and new ideas all the time and finding solutions to real world problems. We’re building on a track record of collaborative innovation that has a long history of success in X-Labs.”

The Reimagined Internship aims to afford JMU students on-the-job training in industries they may not have considered along their career paths while also helping partnering companies address existing or future problems. The opportunities have led to the hire of one former intern in a full-time position at Ellucian and the re-hire of six X-Labs students for a second summer internship, speaking to the success of their initiatives.

“Students walk away from X-Labs experienced with problem-solving skills, communication skills, teamwork skills, agility and critical thinking,” Frigo said, “and those, as we know in today’s landscape in the workforce, are the skills that every company needs. They transcend the specific discipline or expertise that a student or new employee may bring. That’s why we’re excited to be here around the table today, because we want to dive into that conversation and not only help you solve your problems but also create stronger partnerships.”

The June visioning session hosted representatives from 10 companies that are members of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, with which JMU is an academic partner. As a trade association that supports the tech community in Northern Virginia, the council worked with JMU X-Labs to contact about 30 potentially interested and “forward-thinking” companies from the council’s approximate 300-person membership to discuss with X-Labs how interns might help them achieve their goals.

The four-hour, highly interactive visioning session, designed by X-Labs, aimed to demonstrate how companies can rethink the traditional internship model to explore new possibilities, gain first-hand insights from Ellucian HR and Innovation executives, and strategize with JMU experts in innovation and workforce development to turn their ideas into actions.

Additionally, participants engaged in a 60-minute design sprint with Dr. Patrice Ludwig (’96, ’01M), interim assistant vice president of research and innovation at JMU, to help them define key challenges, generate innovative solutions, and identify actionable next steps tailored to their business and industry.

Part of an informational panel were Ellucian team members Bill Blackford, vice president of global talent management; Sania Khan, senior vice president of product and strategic innovation; Lacey Gerard, director of experience design; and former X-Labs Reimagined intern Hamid Elias (’24), now an associate project manager at Ellucian.

When planning to incorporate JMU interns, Ellucian was “looking for folks who are great communicators,” Khan said, “... not just people who are ready to go and code.” In addition to storytelling skills and an understanding of the ethical implications of using technology, Ellucian wanted a team that could “embody the future of education [and] ed tech development,” she explained. “It really matched our innovation mindset.”

The Reimagined Internship is unique, because it instructs students in a cohort class during the spring semester before their summer internship. By the time they arrive at Ellucian, they’ve already worked together as subject-matter experts on their team.

Ellucian had many reasons for wanting to work with JMU X-Labs, Blackford said, but the main ones were experimenting with a skills-first approach and discovering how the cohort model might benefit them in ways a more traditional model hasn’t.

“The prep course, from a strategic standpoint, that’s the key differentiator,” he said. “The course is where they’re learning how to work and how to work as a team, and I think that’s where we saw the real value ... So then, when they came in here, when we say they hit the ground running, they were running their own sprints within two weeks from the start of interning. We’ve never had that.”

The experience was new and unique for the students as well, shared Elias, an Economics major who had done previous internships in banking, sales and legislative work. “In a traditional internship, the first week [is] onboarding,” he said. “The next maybe month, you’re learning, training just to understand that role. And then you’re already halfway through summer. You haven’t really delivered anything. But as interns and as students, we want to actually do something; we’re here to actually provide some level of value. And this prep course gave us that opportunity to come in and right from the jump begin presenting value.”

This summer, Ellucian’s is hosting 53 interns from various schools, including 21 from JMU in Reston. Of those, 10 are members of the second cohort from the Reimagined Internship, six from the pilot cohort are returning in various roles, and five are JMU students who applied independently of the Reimagined Internship. “The mission of our company is to empower institutions, so they can enable student success,” Blackford said. “What better way to actually enable student success than to help really promote career readiness?”

In pitching other would-be partners, Frigo asked attendees to consider what problems their companies might want to solve by employing a cohort team of interns — or several individual interns — who could train through X-Labs ahead of time on work they would then bring to companies during a future summer internship.

“You’re here not just as potential partners but as co-creators of something,” Frigo said. “This is a tailor-made internship program. We are looking for you to tell us what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.”

Ellucian’s partnership with X-Labs began in Fall of 2023 with an informal conversation that Frigo said solidified within six weeks, “because everybody said, ‘Yes.’ There were no barriers. There was never a conversation that slowed anything down. That’s the remarkable part.”

Ellucian’s chief product and technology officer, Mike Wulff, remarked to Frigo about needing to hire “whole-brain engineers,” Frigo recalled. “Ellucian was thinking very seriously about this. ... ‘We don’t need head-down developers anymore. That’s a thing of the past. We need problem solvers, critical thinkers. We need communicators. We need people who know how to be on teams. We need agile people.’”

A week after their meeting, Frigo approached Ellucian about combining an X-Labs course with the company’s internship program. “Mike had told me they put a lot of investment in early career development,” Frigo said. “So, what if it started with a challenge inside Ellucian, just like we start everything in X-Labs with a challenge, and students spend a semester tackling it? ... And Ellucian didn’t just say yes. They said, ‘How soon can we start?’”

Though the Reimagined Internship is only in its second year, X-Labs has partnered with various other companies to co-design experiences based on solving real-world problems that external partners provide.

“We offer consulting and management of the partnership,” Frigo said, “but the real goal is mutually beneficial partnerships. Over the last 10 years, X-Labs tackled problems ranging from drone disaster response to food-system resilience to national security innovation. And our students are the ones discovering the solutions.”

For more information on partnering with JMU X-Labs on the Reimagined Internship, email jmuxlabs@jmu.edu or visit https://www.jmu.edu/jmuxlabs/about/index.shtml.