Lockheed Martin’s summer Supply Chain Sustainability intern program provides teams of university students with real-world experience by engaging them to seek solutions to current supply chain challenges. Each challenge is sponsored by a functional team at Lockheed Martin. Students work together to research the challenge and ultimately provide recommended solutions. In 2022, we had 16 interns participate across four challenge areas.
We shifted our program’s focus for 2022 from idea generation to project implementation in order to maximize impact, taking into consideration the prior year’s ideas and current challenges. For example, one team of interns implemented a data analytics idea related to cybersecurity compliance across Lockheed Martin business areas, increasing efficiency and saving 20 working hours per month. In addition to time saved, the solution allows for consistent analysis of Controlled Unclassified Information and Covered Defense Information compliance across all business areas and enables program visibility, identifying vendor-specific capabilities and trends in compliance.
The Lockheed Martin intern program has become so successful that we engaged the International Aerospace Environmental Group (IAEG) to pilot an industry-level sustainability intern program. Interns who took part in the pilot researched what ESG factors are most important to the aerospace and defense industry. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Collins Aerospace and BAE Systems participated in the pilot, enabling interns to be involved in discussions and meetings across companies and engage in industrywide collaboration. Results were provided to the IAEG Board of Directors, and the intern program will become an official IAEG program in 2023, which Lockheed Martin will manage. This program will help engage new talent in the aerospace and defense industry and generate innovative ideas.