What an Internship Teaches You- 5 Practical Benefits

As explained by the Cambridge Dictionary, an internship is “a period of time during which someone works for a company or organisation in order to get experience of a particular type of work”.

Internships can follow the same structure as a full-time job (40 hours per week) or can also be part-time (20+ hours). Usually, they last somewhere between ~2 to ~6 months, allowing sufficient time for a learning curve.

Although some internship experiences are infamously stereotyped as only bringing coffee to your managers and printing mindless copies of documents, they can be much more than these repetitive tasks. A good internship experience challenges you and helps you develop both on a professional and a personal level.

But what’s exactly in it for you? Here are 5 great benefits of doing an internship.

What are the benefits?

1. Get practical work experience

The greatest benefit of doing an internship is that it helps you gain real-life working experience.

Internships offer valuable opportunities to complement the theoretical knowledge you gain at university with practical knowledge from the workplace.

Having this combination of experiences can provide you with an advantage in today’s highly competitive talent market.

2. Boost your CV

If you want to enrich your CV, internships are great opportunities to highlight your work.

You can showcase the relevance of your internship by focusing on the hard and soft skills you developed, different projects you led, and most importantly, the ultimate value you created for your team and organisation.

3. Build and strengthen your professional network

Doing an internship allows you to network with different professionals within an organisation. Every interaction you have with people could be an opportunity for you to get to know them better, understand their professional background and learn from their experiences.

What’s even better is that through your internship, you can even find a mentor who could help and guide you through the next steps in your career.

So, always do your best to nurture your relationships with the people you work together with.

Even if they have no open job positions or recruitment power at the moment, they can refer you to another department or company. They can also introduce you to other professionals who might have opportunities available.

4. Understand what type of company (and their culture) you prefer working in

There are huge differences between doing an internship in an established corporation vs. a start-up that is starting to crawl.

If you choose a corporate, you get to see how different departments cooperate to keep the bigger organism (the company) alive. During your internship, you’ll also then understand the hierarchical structure between the managers and subordinates. You'll also understand how you might need to change your communication style based on who are you talking to.

On the other hand, if you go with a start-up or a scale-up, you’ll see that things are way more initiative based rather than bureaucratic. If you have a cool project idea, you can most likely just pitch and dive into it instead of waiting for approvals from numerous stakeholders (which usually takes forever). This way, you also see the immediate results of your initiatives.

So it is up to you to decide which one to choose as a first experience. Our recommendation is to experience both, so you understand the different ways of operating and decide for yourself which environment you would like to kick-start your professional career in.

5. The possibility to get a full time offer after your internship

Another benefit of doing an internship is that it can lead to a full-time job afterward. When companies have open vacancies, they usually consider their internal talents first, including their interns. As you already have an understanding of the company’s priorities, values, and vision, you are likely to be a good fit for the culture.

Always try to highlight the quality of your work and the value you are offering to the company and the team you are working with. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be offered a full-time opportunity after you graduate.

We hope these reasons give you that extra push to apply for an internship. If these are not enough, maybe some personal experiences from us will convince you.

We have both done internships during our university days. We can guarantee you that they teach you much more than a textbook or university professor.

After your internship, when you interview for a full-time position, you already have some experience you can share with the interviewer. We learned a lot about what type of jobs and organisations we do not want to work, narrowing our search for our next steps.

Good luck with your internship and if you have any questions contact us via email or Instagram!