✺ For businesses
Taking on an intern: how it works and what your business gets
Every season starts the same way: looking for staff who never turn up, or who turn up and leave six weeks later. Here is how the alternative works.
The problem you already know
Hiring in Las Terrenas always looks the same. The season arrives, you need people, and there are two options: bring staff in from outside, who leave as soon as they find something closer to home, or hire locally without training and absorb the cost of teaching them while service suffers.
The second option is the good one for the town, but you pay the cost alone. Our programme exists, in large part, to share that cost.
What a work placement partner is
A work placement partner takes on students during the work-study phase of the programme. In practical terms:
Three days a week in your establishment
- The other two, in class at Sienna Village.
Eight weeks of placement
- During the work-study phase, after the initial intensive training.
With four weeks of training already behind them
- Academic base, English, hygiene and safety, and the technical fundamentals of their speciality.
One-to-one support throughout the placement
- If something is not working, it is not your problem to solve alone.
No obligation to hire at the end
- If you want to hire, all the better. That is what it is for.
It is a long, structured, supervised trial period, with someone who already knows the basics.
What they arrive already knowing
It depends on the specialisation, but in every case the student arrives with what takes an employer longest to teach.
Food and beverage
- Dominican and international cooking techniques, food safety and hygiene, mixology, floor service, POS and reservation systems.
Hospitality
- Reservation systems (PMS), check-in and check-out, international cleaning standards, telephone manner, resolving guest problems.
Local tourism
- Routes and attractions of the Samaná peninsula, flora and fauna, tour storytelling, first aid, group handling, serving customers from many cultures.
And in all three: English applied to the trade, punctuality, personal presentation and professional conduct. That last block — the one that makes an employee last — has a whole phase of the programme to itself.
What we ask of you
- A point of contact in your team for us to coordinate with
- Real work, not observation: you learn by serving real tables and cleaning real rooms
- Honest feedback on what is missing, so we fix it for the next cohort
Other ways to take part
Not every business can take interns in season. There are three more routes.
Teaching partner
- Executive chefs, hotel managers, bartenders, housekeeping supervisors, certified guides: teaching a few hours a week in your own speciality. Our model depends on it — we want the teaching done by people who still do the job.
Institutional partner
- INFOTEP, the Ministry of Tourism, universities, ASONAHORES, chambers of commerce: recognition, certification and outreach.
Funding partner
- Banks, credit unions, private investors and foundations. USD 500 covers a student's full scholarship; USD 1,500 funds one month of the programme for three.
Why this works in Las Terrenas
The foundation operates inside Sienna Authentic Living, with a restaurant, an eight-room eco-lodge, a shop and an eco-park that genuinely operate, with real customers and real guests. Before reaching your business, the student has already worked with the public.
That is the whole argument: private investment in the development sustains the training, and the training gives the town trained staff back. When it works, every business in town hires better — yours included.
We are a network of more than 15 partner companies. Each one takes interns, hires graduates or teaches. None of them does it out of charity.