Building diverse career choice through internship

Internship is the first stepping stone to campus to corporate transformation. For most of us, this is the place where one will first see the true value created through team work and leadership.

Though, truly speaking, after having a full-time work experience internship does not add much value to the entire profile but it is very crucial to manage good internship to provide right signal to the potential future employer to get first job in your domain of interest. As the saying goes “There many high paying jobs but not enough good jobs”.

As the new standard of corporate life is slogging for long hours and work with utmost passion finding an interesting job may be not so easy. Being a service based country, the roles offered in first job is usually not upto the expectation of engineer where he/she does routine automated work with very little scope of creativity and innovation. So, eventually after two years in job frustration looms large and then end up choosing either MBA or UPSC. But we can avoid this beaten path if we carefully focus on the life after engineering through informed choice and making the best out of internship opportunities during our college days.

Following four components lead to a good paying interesting job-1) Knowledge 2) Skill 3) Attitude and 4) Practical exposure. Internship helps to build all these four components in a very subtle way at a nascent stage of one's career.

Firstly, I would like to point out few things that we do wrongly while going for internship. Most of the engineers look out for internship in the summer vacation of 3rd year to build resume for the upcoming placement season. Right approach to a meaningful internship is that start searching for internships from the 1st day of your engineering whether it is paid and 8-12 weeks or pro bono or very short in duration. In first two years of engineering explore every possible opportunity in diverse domains. Now, take a deep breath and introspect at the end of 2nd year, in which domain you want to work in long term. Now you are ready to face the real challenges ahead in the next internship and by this time your resume is ready to provide the right and distinguishing signal compared to your competitors to get the right internship. So, now you have choice to work as full-time intern in your 2nd year and 3rd year summer vacation. So, even before sitting for placement in final year you have close to six months of solid professional experience in your preferred domain and while working in internship you already build a professional network with the colleagues with whom you have worked hard to achieve your goal.

 If you are wondering where can I find all this internship opportunities? Internshala, LinkedIn, Hello Intern, Letsintern, Twenty19 are great place to be to find the internship that matches your interest. Along with that, one can speak with their university/college alums to know about the internship in their organizations. Also, during the placement, many companies offer internship roles to 2nd and 3rd year students. So, keep the ears and eyes always open.

Now, I would like to point out why it is so crucial in Indian context in most of the times. In India a substantial part of our education system is marks based and out of touch with the fast-changing industry. Secondly, most of the jobs in India is service based and a significant chunk of it is, in fact, IT support or low-end development work which most of the youth does not find interesting after certain point of time. On the other hand, hiring human resources is cheap and easy to replace as the cost of doing so is very less compared to the other countries in the world. Coupled with this, is the thousands of engineering graduates who are coming into the job market each year with very little differentiating practical skill and expertise. Secondly, Indian job market is experience sticky. Once, you have worked in some domains for 3+ years, the rest is assured that even after MBA it will be extremely difficult to change both the function and the domain if you don’t like your job. These inherent problems of Indian job market can be circumscribed by an informed individual through multiple internship so that one is equipped with the decision of which war to fight before the wars begin.