1.
Employers increasingly want to see experience in the new college grads they
hire. A staggering 95 percent of employers said candidate
experience is a factor in hiring decisions, according to an annual survey by
the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Nearly half of
surveyed employers wanted new-grad experience to come from internships or co-op
programs. If you have completed internships, you will clearly have an edge over
your classmates who haven’t. In an Associated Press article, reporter Emily
Fredrix quotes Philip D. Gardner, research director of the Collegiate Employment
Research Institute, as saying that internship experience is “just one of those
things you have to have before employers will even consider looking at your
resume.”
2. Employers
increasingly see their internship programs as the best path for hiring
entry-level candidates. “Not only
does participation in an internship make the student a more attractive
candidate,” says NACE Executive Director Marilyn Macke, “but it can also be an
avenue to a job.” NACE’s 2008 Experiential Education Survey shows that hiring
from the intern program is growing. Employers reported that nearly 36 percent
of the new college graduates they hired from the Class of 2007 came from their
own internship programs, up from 30 percent from the Class of 2005. Matthew
Zinman of the Internship Institute reports that IBM hires up to 2,000 interns
annually and converts more than half of them to full-time hires. Recruiting
guru Dr. John Sullivan writes on the Electronic Recruiting Exchange that “the
most effective sources I have worked with have consistently found that quality
internship programs produce the highest quality candidates, the most productive
hires, and the hires with the highest retention rates.”
3. You may get paid
more when you graduate if you’ve done one or more internships. Even back in 2005, NACE reported that surveyed employers
that hired entry-level candidates with internship/co-op experience paid them
6.5 more than those without the experience.
4. You could earn
college credit toward your degree. Many if
not most colleges provide credit for eligible internships. Check with your
faculty adviser or career-services office to see what your school’s or
major-department’s policies are.
5. Internships
enable you take your career plan for a test drive. You might discover by interning in your planned career
field that it’s not what you thought it would be like. Or one niche of your
field is a better fit for you than another. Let’s say you’re a marketing major,
and you complete an internship in marketing research. You discover you hate it.
Before giving up on marketing, you do an internship in public relations and
find it’s a perfect fit for you. Isn’t it better to figure all this outbefore you
graduate and are stuck in a field that’s not for you? You can also test out
career paths not in your major. Let’s say you’ve decided on a major but always
had a lingering interest in a completely different field. You could do an
internship in the other field to decide how strong your interest really is and
whether you want to beef up your studies in that field. Finally, you can test
out creative ways to combine your interests, as one student we know did who was
wavering between med school and a marketing career and did internships that
combined medicine and marketing. She ultimately pursued grad school in
health-care policy.
6. You’ll gain
valuable understanding of your major field and be better able to grasp how your
coursework is preparing you to enter your chosen career. You may also discover gaps between your classroom
learning and what you need to know in the real world and can strategize how you
will fill those gaps. Some employers will even suggest additional courses you
should consider.
7. You’ll develop skills
galore. Maybe you already have the great interpersonal skills
employers seek. But in an internship, you can’t help but sharpen them by
interacting with people on a professional level and in a way that you would
never have the opportunity to do in the classroom. The same goes for the
teamwork, communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills that employers
lust for.
8. You’ll gain
confidence. If you’re afraid of
facing the work world when you graduate, an internship will teach you that you
can do it.
9. You’ll build
motivation and work habits. All that
freedom you gained when you left home for college may have caused your
motivation and work ethic to slip. You might be skipping a few classes, missing
assignments, or building a class schedule that doesn’t require you to get up
early. There’s nothing like an internship — where you can’t slack off if you
want to succeed — to instill in you the workplace characteristics you’ll need
after you graduate.
10. You’ll build
your network. Everyone
you meet in an internship is a potential contact for your network and someone
you can call upon for advice and referrals when you are job-hunting closer to
graduation time.
11. You will build
your resume. Any kind
of experience on your resume is helpful, but career-relevant internship
experience will make a better impression on employers than your serving job at
Applebee’s.
12. Growing numbers
of colleges require internships, reports
Zinman. If they’re requiring them, they must be convinced that internships are
important. Similarly, studies show increasing numbers of students are
completing internships. Presumably these students know that internships are
valuable for all the reasons listed here.
13. You might make
money. Not all internships are paid, of course, but those that
do pay can yield pretty decent salaries. Employers queried in NACE’s 2008
Experiential Education Survey reported offering their undergraduate interns an
average of $16.33 per hour.
Now, granted some readers may be saying, “I know all this
stuff, but insurmountable obstacles keep me from doing internships.” Perhaps
it’s imperative that you hold a paying job that leaves no time for internships.
Perhaps you have family, athletic, or extracurricular obligations. Maybe you
live or attend school in an area where internships are scarce. While all these
are legitimate obstacles, I still say find a way to complete at least one
internship. Work with your school’s career-services office to surmount your
obstacles and become an intern. If other paid or unpaid obligations are the
issue, target summer when your school obligations are decreased. Juggle your
schedule so you are essentially working two jobs — your internship and your
other obligations. But don’t overlook the possibility of internships during
your time in school. If you get college credit for an internship, you can spend
the time you would have spent on coursework completing your internship
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