Internships vs General Education

The biggest benefit of internships is, beyond doubt, the opportunity of gaining valuable work experience along with learning the basics of a certain profession. Unlike learning from coursebooks or classroom-based education, one acquires professional knowledge plus skills, plus a bit of experience, all in one.

Internship lets you explore your future (or potential) career path, so you can quickly form your final decision about making this particular career your lifetime occupation or moving on to doing something different.

My university students often display quite unclear, often sugar-coated vision of their future jobs. Future managers, for example see themselves as "kings" of big business, invincible and permanently successful guys wearing expensive suits and shaking hands of the world's most renowned personalities. The future interpreters believe that they will be standing between presidents and assisting them in communication about protecting the Earth's climate at global summit meetings. Few of them realize that behind these beautiful images there is a huge, mind-sucking, enormously tiring and boring period of preparation, organizing and paperwork... which will also be their responsibility. Going to an internship training will help every professional to shake off the chocolate-box understanding and lead them toward the right and realistic career goal-setting.

Quite often, internships offer a very pleasant thing to newcomers: financial compensation. Think about it: they teach you, they show you how your career may actually work for you, they reveal professional tricks, know-how and even some company secrets, and they pay you for learning from them! Amazing, isn't it?

Another absolutely invaluable thing is the chance to network with professionals working in your field. Nothing can be more precious for a beginner than being accepted into the circle of real experts and learn from them by simply being around them every day. This can be challenging in the beginning, but once you understand that you have chosen the right path, you will learn to work hand in hand with experts, and this will give you confidence, and a bit later -- professionalism.

Many companies hire their interns at the end of internship. In fact, this is their idea: to find the most suitable candidates and prepare them for future careers in their company. For the candidate, internship is a perfect way to make a smooth transition into a new job (sometimes into a completely new professional domain).

Summing up all this, I can only make a conclusion that internships are the best possible way for job candidates to move to a new level in their careers. At the same time, it is a win-win situation for the companies, too, because they acquire well-trained work-force, adapted for their particular needs.