A Guide for Summer Interns

Attention, interns: Now that summer is half over, it’s time to take stock of your summer internship and make sure you’re moving in the right direction. So writes Jodi Glickman in a blogpost for the Harvard Business Review.

“No one cares more about managing your career than you do,” she writes. So how do you make the experience worthwhile both from a learning perspective and from a strategic perspective — i.e. landing a full-time offer, securing a great letter of reference, or simply making a positive impression on your colleagues to leverage going forward?

Glickman offers a way to think about where you are now, where you’re going, and how to get there — she calls it Your Personal Matrix and it includes a snapshot of your Current Situation along with your Wish List of where you hope to go/be:

Current Situation: A	Wish List: Z
What you’re doing or have done	What you want or hope to do
Who you have worked with	Who you want or hope to work with

Current Situation

The midpoint of your internship is a great time to take stock of where you’ve been. What have you learned and/or contributed thus far?  What are you particularly proud of?

Wish List

Your Wish List is more fun to dream up and represents your strategic direction or goal post, Glickman writes. Where do you want to be by summer’s end? What types of projects do you want to work on that are reasonable and realistic? Who can help make those goals happen?

Now What?

Once you’ve developed your matrix, you have your starting point (Point A) and your end goal (Point Z). Start plotting points that will get you from A to Z with tangible, manageable steps. You can sit down with your manager for an informal conversation or at your midpoint review and ask to work with certain people or projects on your Wish List. Whether or not you actually share your matrix with your manager or mentor, use it to guide your discussions around career development and next steps.

Interns get a Head Start on Competition for Jobs

Even though companies say that, on average, they’ll hire 19% more new graduates this year than they did in 2010, some graduates might find that a good portion of companies’ incoming classes are already filled.

That’s because companies say that nearly 40% of this year’s entry-level positions will be filled by former interns, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) and reported by Joe Light in the Wall St. Journal online.

Companies have found that former interns understand the company’s culture and are therefore less likely to leave quickly because of a bad fit. They also are easy to hire—reportedly about 90% of the interns who are offered full-time positions accept.

Mark Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of career services at Washington University in St. Louis believes that over the past five years landing an internship has become even more vital to getting a full-time position, but he isn’t sure undergraduate students always understand the internship’s importance.

In the past, Mr. Smith encouraged students to get an internship between their junior and senior years, but now, he said, work experience after a student’s freshman year is becoming just as crucial.

For more, go here.

How to Find Your Ideal Internship

If you are a job seeker, especially one who is close to completing school, you may want to test drive your potential career.  And one of the best ways to do that is to get an internship. Employers want their employees to have “real world” experience, and internships (paid or unpaid) are one of the best ways for students to get that experience.

So how do you find your ideal internship? According to Randall Hansen, at Quintessential Careers, it’s a three-step process:

1. Determine Your Internship Goals
2. Prepare/Polish Your Job Search Skills, and
3. Find/Track Down Internship Sources.