What are internships?

Internships are student and graduate placements, aimed at giving them some experience before they join the employment market full-on. They are usually only a few months in duration, and are like more involved versions of work experience and shadowing, which you might have done during secondary school and sixth form.

However, they differ in a number of crucial ways:

• You will probably be there for longer.
• You are more likely to be assigned ‘real’ work, and develop real skills as a result.
• You are more likely to get paid.
• It probably will ‘look good on your CV’.

Of course, this isn’t absolute. Internships are used in very different ways by different employers in different industries. Some internships with big graduate employers in sectors such as banking are well paid, and are essential stepping stones to a place on their graduate schemes. Other internships, particularly in fashion and the media, may be unpaid.

Why bother?

Internships take time and effort. That time and effort could be spent studying, sleeping, having fun, or earning hard currency. However, you can get much out of them that will make them worthwhile:

1. Find out whether you like the career – A lot of career choices are made on childhood aspirations, or other, similar uninformed decisions. Internships give you the time and insight needed to figure out whether the industry is really for you.
2. Build up your experience – Employers like to take people on who can slip into a role with the minimum amount of training and acclimatisation. Experience not only involves the skills you have gained on a job, but also your comfort in an environment. Both can be developed on internships.
3. Skip the job interviews – A lot of employers recruit directly from their internships to their graduate programme. They will have got to know you during the internship and will not need to interview you. As such you may be able to avoid the grad scheme competition altogether.
4. Build up your contacts – Even if you don’t get a job off the back of your internship, you will certainly be in a position to develop a network of industry insiders. You can then use them as referees, or as a way to maintain your commercial awareness.

How do graduate internships differ?

In the current tough jobs market, graduates have increasingly been taking up internships after finishing their studies. Graduate internships can obviously last longer than student internships, which are limited to the length of the summer holidays. Sometimes graduate internships are unpaid, fuelling concerns that graduates are vulnerable to exploitation because of the intense competition for jobs. This is also controversial because anyone who is a worker in legal terms is entitled to the national minimum wage.

How to find internships

The good news about internships is that there are plenty of them out there.

• Sector-specialist job boards and websites are also a good place to look.
• Some organisations, particularly the larger ones, also advertise places on their own websites.

Speculative applications are unlikely to get you a paid and structured internship. Many organisations do take candidates on work experience placements, but these tend to be relatively short-term, and almost always unpaid.

How to choose

Internship applications take time, and it’s a good idea to target employers carefully. Some of the big graduate employers in areas such as finance break down their internship schemes into a number of different streams, so you may have to choose your preferred option when you apply. Here are some points to think about when you’re deciding what internship you want.

1. Keep an eye on internship deadlines – For example, some finance internships close as early as November, and there are many deadlines around the end of December and early January.
2. Find out what you will be doing – Not all big employers give interns proper work to do. The best internships are those which actually equip you with some of the skills you will need when you are doing the job. For this reason it is worth finding out what kind of jobs you will be doing beforehand.
3. Really think about career progression – If you intend to use the internships to fast-track into the subsequent grad scheme you will need to choose the first step carefully. After this point it will be harder to change your mind.
4. Take time and distance into account – If you aren’t used to working 9-5 days, or commuting for hours at a time, then this may be something to bear in mind. How willing are you to compromise your time?

Source: Ross, Targetjobs.co.uk, Thursday 27th October 2011