From my perspective, one of the striking things about today’s job market, compared to when I was starting out, is the role and importance of internships. This came home to me last weekend during a lazy discussion of careers.

Four of us were involved. There was me, age 62. There was a man of about 50, a woman in her thirties and a college student.

For the college student, internships are a natural part of the way you learn and wind up in a job or career that’s right for you. He had one in high school and in each of his college summers.

When the woman went through school, there were lots of people doing internships, but you still stood out if you did one. She went to work at a television station during college and discovered that she loved the business. Today she’s a producer with a cable network.

The 50-year-old didn’t really have an internship, per se. He got a job at a local TV station, while he worked on his degree in journalism. He thought it would give him good experience. When he graduated, the station hired him.

When I was going through school, I doubt that many people beyond those going into medicine knew what an internship was. I certainly didn’t.

One reason why internships have become so popular is that they work for everyone. The intern gets the opportunity to try out different settings and see work up close that they can’t experience any other way. The internship can be an “employment audition,” too.

And employers like internships. They get some work done, but more importantly they get to look at people up close that they may, or may not, want to hire one day.

Internships have become so common that the challenge today is different than in was even ten or fifteen years ago. Today, you’ll have a lot of internship opportunities to choose from, but you’ll also have competition for the good ones.

So start grabbing internship experience early. And, every year lay out a strategy to get the internship you want.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under Tools and Strategies for Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.