Internship: Your stepping stone towards career success!

An internship is a professional learning experience that offers meaningful and real-world simulation of student’s field of education or career interest. An internship gives a student the occasion for career exploration and development, and to acquire new skills. It indeed offers the employer the opportunity to bring fresh blood with new ideas and energy into the workplace, develop talent and possibly build a pipeline for future full-time employees.
The importance of an internship experience cannot be undermined. Today, employers prefer prospective employees who have done not only just one internship but several internships and projects that enrich his personality.  A college education system will serve to drive a graduate into a profession by conferring a degree, which determines an academic expertise in various theoretical and practical ways that a job might be performed. In a nutshell, college education empowers a student with the necessary technical and subject-matter skills set.
Taking up an internship bridges the gap between intangible theories and wrote-learnt examples with tangible and real-life practical learnings. It provides an opportunity to a student to internalise work culture and perform actual specialized tasks, which the job entails. It also encourages the student to juggle and go out of his way to complete his projects and college assignments along with the internship tasks. Moreso, in today’s competitive world, it is vital that students make an internship a top priority.
An internship turning into a job is one of the greatest and gratifying outcomes of an internship. So firstly, let us understand why do I take up an internship? How do I feel great about the superhero responsibilities of being a juggler and a true performer as an intern and a college student?
To gain real-time experience
Let’s face it – this is the only way to pump up your resume and gain some experience. Taking up an internship not only permits you to gain first-hand understanding of working in the real business world but also equips you to do a bit of everything. You can play around with different roles and tasks.
It also permits students to harness the skill, knowledge, and theoretical concepts they learnt in their college or university.
To Learn More About Yourself:
To know yourself is to know your goals and objectives and how to best achieve them.
Discovering this level of clarity is difficult during college hours, but sometimes all it takes is attempting something new, out of your comfort zone. Take this an opportunity to know every element of working in a professional setup. Write your observations and take down your notes. Be inquisitive to know more and do more.
To learn by watching and doing
You pick many new skills while experimenting with many roles, industry and people, who work closely with you. Sharing new ideas is truly encouraged and expected hence, you may capitalise this opportunity. Communicating and networking with varied people will be the key! People also expect that you will learn through your mistakes and that is highly motivating and boosting you out of apprehension and self doubt.
To build confidence
Internships could span across 2 – 6 months. This time allows you to groom yourself and adapt to a certain professional persona. You also can pick up wide variety of tasks and refine your skills and speed. If you want to specialise in Human Resource Management, one could look minutely and try your hand into varied functions to finally make a firm choice in your career. This testing time boosts your confidence and allows you to set your best foot forward in your career.
To grow Your Professional Network:
Making contacts is an exchange of information between people, with the ultimate goal of establishing connections and associations to advance your professional career. Being an intern gives you plethora of opportunities to build connections with company professionals that can be very advantageous for your career. It opens up your door to wider network of like-minded professionals and the fraternity in the industry
Case by example
Let’s take an example of Ms. Divya Sharma, an aspirant Human resource professional who decides to take up a two months internship in the human resources department of XYZ organization.
Divya, being an intern with no relevant experience is involved in the day to day activities of the department. She gets to understand various job profiles and job roles existing in the department.
She is being involved in the recruitment process, joining formalities and training and development co-ordination. This two-month internship will help her get an insight on the various roles that a Human Resources personnel is required to do. This internship experience will not only help her for her project and placements but also give her a deeper insight of what she would like to pursue in her HR career. She will come out of her comfort zone (read as ‘student zone’) and try something new that she has never done before.
Employers prefer candidates who have some experience over those who don’t possess any. Not only do employers look for certain skills on their candidates’ resumes and want them to possess certain key skills and qualities, but they also highly bank upon work experience earned while hiring fresh graduates.
If one has a relevant internship displayed on their resume, it will give them a competitive edge over all the other candidates applying for the same position. Employers understand that graduates who do not possess any practical experience, may lack the skills required to excel on the first day of their employment. They value internship experience because they have already kickstarted their learning curve and have fairly inducted oneself in professional ethos.
Don’t let money be the decisive factor when you’re thinking of an internship. While bulking up your resume with rewards and extra-curricular achievements is no brainer today, gaining valuable experience through a well-structured internship program will have a vital addition to your profile. The ‘nice-to-have’ internship in earlier days has now become ‘must-to-have’ to redefine your career goals!