Step Up Your Hiring Game: Attracting Interns through a Field Experience Manual

Are you worried about staffing shortages and how many international staff you can hire? Have you heard potential staff say, “Thanks for the offer, but I need an internship”? Creating a field experience manual to attract and hire interns for camp jobs is a great answer for both concerns.

Innovation Engineers: Encourage Your Staff to Engage and Create

Keeping staff engaged is an age-old challenge that begs for a new twist given our current times and circumstances. The Summer Camp Innovation Network organized a space for innovation by connecting 18- to 22-year-old university students with camp professionals to create synergy around engagement of staff. Daniel Shore and Kim Aycock challenged the teams to create an idea that motivates staff to engage between summers. 

A Letter From a First-Year Summer Camp Staff Member

This blog post in support of Project Real Job offers advice on how to help first-year staff members ease into camp life.

Caught Between Two Staff Seasons: Looking Back Before Moving Forward with Veteran Staff

Now is a great time to develop a plan for inviting staff back and securing their commitment, offering leadership roles and opportunities to advance, and keeping staff engaged in the time between now and next summer. 

Biting My Nails: Revisiting Staff Anxiety

It was three years ago when I first wrote about the increasing levels of anxiety that camp directors were seeing in their staff (Ditter, 2016). At the time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta had been reporting that anxiety in children ages 13–18 was at a 40-year high (CDC, 2011). In a survey conducted by the American Camp Association’s Healthy Camps Committee after the summer of 2015, camp directors indicated that anxiety was their number one concern when it came to staff (Gaston, 2015).

Three Different Roads That Led to Working at Camp

Working at summer camp helps young adults learn skills that will be valuable in their future careers, including leadership, communication, and more.

Outside Camp Customers and Inside Camp Customers

Camp owners always remember their outside customers (camp parents and campers), but inside customers (camp staff) are just as important.

Overcome Common Barriers to Making Your Camp Staff Feel Valued

Ah, the annual review at work. Or, in our camp settings, the end-of-session/summer evaluation. What a wonderful time for me, as a supervisor, to finally tell a staff member how I think they generally did for the entire time period prior to the evaluation (at least based on the few times I saw them in action and what I heard from others). Finally, a chance to tell this staff member that even though they were never Counselor of the Week or an All-Camp Event Team Captain, they did some things well.

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