How to stand out from the crowd to get a PM internship?

I recently held a webinar on 'How to be productive as a Remote PM'. Link below:

Post the webinar, few folks reached out to me on LinkedIn asking for guidance on how they could fine-tune their resume and better prepare if they want to land a PM internship.

In this post, I will share a few suggestions, so that it can help the community of recent college graduates, who are aspiring to be a product manager and looking for ways to land a PM internship.

First and foremost, let's start with the resume. I took the time to review resumes of folks who reached out to me for help, and I noticed a few patterns. As a recent college graduate or someone who is still studying, it is difficult to showcase work experience. So, most folks struggle with how do I communicate to a potential recruiter that I am passionate about product management and would love an opportunity to intern.

At the same time, I noticed that folks who are truly passionate had tried to participate in some industry competitions where they could build products. However, the resumes were not clearly spotlighting those and bringing forward the efforts towards product management that these folks were making. Here is what I will suggest:

1. Take a critical look at your resume to identify those competitions/ projects that you have done to build yourself towards the PM discipline, and ensure that these are better elaborated with what exactly you did as a product owner, so that recruiters can understand your passion and skills in this direction
2. As much as possible, try to articulate the impact of the product you tried to build for the competition/ project
3. When you apply to any PM intern openings, do include a cover note to help the recruiters understand your passion and skills towards product management, and how you think you could contribute positively to the opening in question
4. Also, highlight the trainings/ certifications you are taking to learn more about product management

Now, what do you do if you don't have competitions/ projects yet where you showcased PM skills. It's never too late - you can always try to start in this direction, and build up your profile. A few suggestions:

1. Look for industry hackathons/ competitions where you can participate with a small team and build products to compete
2. If you are interested to work as a product manager in the data and analytics space, then keep an eye on kaggle.com to know any data oriented competitions to participate in
3. Partner with an engineer friend, and take up a fun product project, to build something new (or even an existing product you like) and post it open source on GitHub for people to use. By supporting this product and helping people download and use it, you showcase that you can build something useful for the broader audience, and also drive adoption
4. Attend webinars/ podcasts from practicing product managers (similar to ones organized by Product School) to gain better perspective of PM work and responsibilities - this will eventually help you once you land the interviews
5. Take up product management trainings (there are many like CSPO/ PSPO) - anything you can get your hands on to learn more and get better skilled

If you are interested in product management, you need not wait for landing that first internship or PM job, to start building your profile towards it. Proactive efforts and ways to demonstrate skills/ passion in this direction, is surely appreciated and helps you stand out from rest of the crowd.