Internships | Definition, Importance and Benefits

What is an internship?

An internship is an official work experience initiative offered by organisations aimed at providing practical knowledge to students and recent graduates (called interns) in their fields of expertise. It offers students hands-on experience to supplement their theoretical proficiency and allows them to be better equipped at applying their knowledge (both practical and theoretical) in an office setting.

Nowadays, almost all companies from large multinational corporations to small startups in

all sectors of the economy offer different internship programs with differing benefits, durations, and job placement offers. In addition, there has been a rise in many global companies offering virtual internships. All these organisations offer internships for students at different levels- undergraduate, graduate or even postgraduate.

Difference between an Internship and Cooperative Education

The table below highlights the difference between cooperative education and internship.

Internships	Cooperative Education
Internships are usually unpaid. However, recent trends have shown that paid internship programs are on the rise.	Most students get paid in cooperative education.
Internships usually last for a much shorter duration, usually one semester and mostly finished during the summer break.	Cooperative education tends to be more of full-time employment. It can last anywhere between two semesters and the entire duration of your academic program.
In internships, your responsibilities remain the same as assigned at the start of your joining as an intern.	In cooperative education, as your semester progresses, so does your responsibilities
In internships, students are not necessarily offered major-related work.	In cooperative education students are usually offered major-related work within the framework of their academic program.
Internships are usually not for academic credits and do not form a part of students’ official transcripts.	Cooperative education is for academic credits and forms a part of students’ official transcripts.

Benefits of doing an Internship

There’s a common belief that the sole motive behind doing an internship is to enrich your CV and that is far from the truth. Although an internship does enrich your CV, it has a much larger bearing on shaping your employability in the labour market.

Let us delve into the benefits of doing Internships one by one.

1. Compliments your theoretical knowledge.

An internship helps you gain hands-on experience with what you have already learnt in your classroom and helps you apply your knowledge in an official work environment with different factors at play such as teamwork, deadlines, employee relationship, office work culture and stress. This prepares you to be better equipped for employment once you begin your career.

2. Serves as a litmus test.

An internship helps you to get familiar with what to expect from a career path you have chosen in an office setting and allows you to explore whether you have made the right decision or not. It gives scope for one to understand his/her strengths and weaknesses and the opportunity to make changes before his/her career takes off. This experiment can help you streamline your career opportunities according to your demand in a particular job position and prevent you from securing a job that is not for you.

3. Offers job placement.

A recent trend shows that companies often seek interns who would consider working for them in a full-time position if their performance during the internship is satisfactory. Getting a placement offer from a company as an intern shows the faith the company has in you.

This apart from the perks of a promised job, additionally it is a huge confidence booster for a fresher and can be a huge boost in your hunt for another job even if you decide not to take the offer.

4. Platform for skill enhancement.

During internships, interns are exposed to real office environments. It allows you to learn how to work under stress, with deadlines and with peers. It helps you to understand your specific duties and responsibilities and how to deliver your task effectively. Valuable

feedback and suggestions from your mentors can help align your skill sets with what is demanded by the task at hand.

5. Helps develop professionalism.

Internships open doors for dealing with people in a professional setting, be it, clients, peers, or superiors. It helps you learn how to communicate professionally. In addition, having a dedicated mentor can be impactful when it comes to your development as a professional.

6. Forge professional networks and connections.

As an intern, you get to meet people with the same interests, clients and business partners which increases your chances of growing as a professional. It allows you to make

professional bonds and build contacts in your field. Connections within the industry can help you secure better positions in the future through recommendations.

7. Help imbibe collaborative work ethics.

In a competitive industry, having technical knowledge is not enough, you can be the best in

your field but in an office setting, you are not alone and are required to work as a team. Internships help you to master the soft skills required for a collaborative work environment

and inculcate teamwork ethics. This can help you to better prepare for the real-life office environment.

8. An Opportunity to become financially independent.

Nowadays many companies are offering paid internships. Apart from helping you gain entry- level experience, it can help you support yourself financially and indirectly give a glimpse of how it feels to be a breadwinner. It can thus help you to learn how to be financially responsible during college itself.

9. Open doors for other internship opportunities.

The professional experience you have gained in the previous internship programs can help land you into another internship at different companies or different positions within the

same company. Continuation with these opportunities can help secure you a good job profile as it shows your commitment and your appetite for developing your professional skills. In addition, companies network themselves with one another and send recommendations within their network.

10. Platform to pursue new interests.

Internships you decide to pursue do not necessarily need to relate to your academic field. Each one of them provides ample opportunities to experience another branch of your field (offshoots) or an adjacent field. This allows you to test your capabilities in diverse areas and help you to develop new transferable skills. This not only enhances your CV but also gives you an edge to secure better jobs in diverse fields.

Importance of internship

Nowadays, with continuous developments in technology and the ever-increasing birth of new sectors and sub-sectors in the economy, the established relationship between traditional courses offered by our higher education institutions and the jobs demanded in the market is not in tune anymore. Also fuelled by the growing competition, the labour market is getting more and more skewed towards the skilled. Hence it is no surprise that our college degrees alone do not necessarily land us into our desired job profiles. Mastery in certain sets of skills is now increasingly becoming the yardstick of employability. ‘The more skilled you are, the better you sell in the labour market!’ Therefore apart from companies as well as academia, more and more students are increasingly putting the focus on the importance of internships during the time of higher education as a parallel to their traditional academic curriculum.

How can an internship help you get a better job?

An internship is one of the best ways to have a practical hands-on experience with what we have already learnt in our classrooms, it offers us an opportunity to take a brief look at what it is like to work for a living, and gives us insights on how our chosen career is like at an industry level and what it takes to succeed in that field. It also serves as an important platform for career exploration- i.e, to experiment in related or adjacent fields to develop new interests and fine tune and supplement old ones and to better understand our likes and dislikes. It also gives us an idea about organisational structures such as hierarchies, employer-employee relations, workplace cultures etc. and imbibes professionalism through its soft skill enhancement opportunities, especially in communication, problem-solving, teamwork, leadership and delivering tasks under stress and deadlines. Professional feedback that one gains from an experienced mentor in itself helps one to understand his/her strengths and weaknesses and to implement changes as required. Not only that, different job roles and positions offered by different internship programs help you to understand the ins and outs of different responsibilities and can help prevent you from landing an ill-fitting job once your career takes off.

Therefore it is crystal clear from the above discussion that doing internships during college

already gives you an edge over your peers in getting a better job. Not to forget, an internship also serves as a great platform to make professional connections, building connections with peers in the same industry might just play an enabling role in securing you better jobs in future to come. In addition, paid internships are offered nowadays by different companies. Although interns get paid much less than regular employees, this can help ease the financial crunch and we all know how tight the money can get during college.

How to choose the right internship

Having discussed the fundamentals of Internships, the question arises, “How does one choose the right internship program?”

Much like a job hunt, finding the right internship can be a daunting task and it is naturally hard to understand the potential value of a particular internship when you are a newbie. It is to be remembered that there is nothing like a ‘perfect internship’ and choosing one is solely at the discretion of an individual as all of us have different aspirations and dreams when it comes to career choices.

Thus, there is no tailor-made strategy on how to end up with the right internship. However, it would be a crime if we were to end this article without giving generic tips on how to finalize the right internship.

Here are things worth considering while choosing an internship program –

Do not be behind the money alone.
Decide on what sector you would like to do an internship in.
Choose the ones that are best aligned with your future career path.
Chalk out your preferred companies where you wanna do your internship.
Make a bucket list of what you are looking for as an intern.
Consider what skills you will learn from the internship.
Consider the amount of time you have.
Try to go with an internship that gives you scope for networking.
More emphasis on the ones with placement offers.
Read reviews and online ratings from previous interns.

To sum it up, switching from college life to professional life is not always easy as both worlds are very different from one another. Once you enter a professional workforce, it is demanded of you to mould yourself to fit into the professional environment and is an undisputed fact that an internship opportunity is one of the best workforce readiness programs. Although internships are most often linked to college students, there is no hard and fast rule as to who can apply for internships, internships are open to everybody. The truth of the matter is – gaining industry experience offers ample opportunities regardless of what field you are in, or what your desired career path is, as it lays the foundation for your employability and equips you with the set of skills required to kickstart your career and to which we would like to sign off by saying ‘Happy Internship’ to all of you.