Internships and the Job Search
Increasingly, college students, college graduates, and even high school students and older career-changers appreciate the value of internships.
A key benefit of internships is that they provide great opportunities for career exploration, for learning about and âÃútrying outâÃù different professions, industries, and positions.
Moreover, an internship may result, directly or indirectly, in a job offer with the internship employer.
In some degree programs, such as law and MBA, students routinely obtain offers as a result of summer internships.
Other benefits of internships include:
- Providing networking opportunities.
- Providing work experience that can fill out or redirect a resume. Internships can help solve the problem of a general lack of work experience or a lack of sufficient relevant experience.
- Developing work skills that are not taught in school.
- Obtaining current and relevant references.
If an internship does not lead directly to a job offer, it nonetheless clearly has benefits for a job search, for the above reasons. These benefits may seem most obvious for college or professional school graduates, but can also be valuable to other job seekers.
Although looking for work can, and should be, pretty much of a full-time job, if you are a job seeker looking to change career direction somewhat (voluntarily or in response to the market), it may be worth inquiring about a short-term, internship-type of work opportunity. You can sharpen your skills and improve your resume, while you continue your job search.
A good internship offers something to the employer as well.
Of course, there is the opportunity to âÃútry outâÃù potential candidates, which may be a much better way to evaluate their suitability for hire than a conventional recruiting and hiring process, which can yield new hires who interview much better than they work.
There is also an opportunity to obtain free or cheap labor. Interns are often willing to accept such terms because they value so highly the above benefits of internships.
But the minimum wage requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act still applies, unless the intern cannot be considered an âÃúemployee.âÃù Though the Department of Labor uses a multi-factor test, the bottom line appears to be whether the internship is truly providing a training and educational experience that is primarily for the benefit of the intern, not the employer.
Education, not free labor, is what it should be about, if it is to be uncompensated, regardless of the internâÃôs willingness to work for free (rights under the minimum wage law cannot be waived).
Internship Resources
- MBAs Report That an Internship is Essential for Career Success
- Finding an Internship
- Should You Do An Internship?
- How to Find Your Ideal Internship
- Tips for Internship Success
- The New World of Internships
I canâÃôt conclude a post related to the job search without repeating my warnings and suggestions about the prevalence of various types of background check.
Most notably, background checks these days are not only more prevalent, but also more intrusive into what many consider their private information. A background check increasingly includes online searches, which may turn up information you consider private and irrelevant to your job search, such as contents of your MySpace or FaceBook profile.
WouldnâÃôt you hate to have a wonderful internship and then not get an offer from the company because of something juvenile or inappropriate that turned up in the employerâÃôs Internet search?
Article by George Lenard, the originator of GeorgeâÃôs Employment Blawg, has over twenty years of experience in all aspects of labor and employment law, including preventive law as well as litigation. His special interests include employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and noncompetition agreements. He is currently a managing partner with Harris, Dowell, Fisher & Harris, L.C., in St. Louis, Missouri, and lives in the suburb of University City with his wife and family.
