Role of an Internship

More and more higher educational institutions, vocational training organizations are now giving importance to internships before awarding a candidate with a graduate degree. While some students consider it just a formality before achieving the degree, there are more underlying benefits of an internship.

• Internships are an ideal way to understand how ideal your dream job is for you. An internship programme is different from the theoretical knowledge you get from books and lecture sessions as it exposes a candidate to a real life office set up where you need to perform, scrutinize your skills and learn to survive a professional environment. Internships will give you a practical understanding of how ideal the job is for you. You may have dreamt of getting a particular job in a particular company, but through an internship you will learn how far the job suits your timings, your ideologies and your skill.

• The best part about internships is that they last for a short duration. During this time, you can understand the demands of the job and learn more about your capability to fulfill them. You can move on to a different job if you think you cannot adapt to the work environment or train yourself further to meet the demands of the job. The advantage of an internship over a full time job is that you get the opportunity to understand the requirements and demands of the job beforehand and can prepare yourself accordingly. By taking up a full time job that doesn’t suit you will only make you end up being frustrated and take wrong decisions which can harm your career.

• One of the most important aspects of internships is that they give you an on-the-job opportunity of developing soft skills. These days companies give a lot of importance to behavioral skills over technical aptitude. Through an internship, you learn to work in teams, communicate with a supervisor, handle team events and work with people of all ages and from different walks of life. Even if you think you haven’t learnt much of the technical side during the internship, you will definitely leave as a wiser and more refined person after your brief stint at a company as an intern.