The COVID-19 pandemic has put India in front of a mass of challenges. People from every societal and economic aspect, including businessmen, students and working professionals in the country have been affected by the same. We are all dynamically adapting to the situation being dictated by the COVID-19 outbreak. Schools and colleges are closed rendering students to stay at home and continue their education virtually. All companies are closed and are forced to either function remotely or stay out of business due to the infeasibility of the job.
The months from April to July are traditionally called the internship season for the student community. However, due to COVID-19, a lot of companies aren’t able to hire the summer interns or onboard the hired ones. Many companies had to either postpone or cancel their summer internship programmes due to the outbreak, while many have decided to turn their internship into virtual internship opportunities. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google have also recently turned their summer internships into virtual internship programmes.
This uncertainty around internships during COVID-19 has affected thousands of college students across India. Many of them had internship offers that have been cancelled due to the pandemic, while many others were still looking forward to the summer season to find internship opportunities.
Now, the immediate question that arises is how can students navigate through these times and find the best of internship opportunities.
There are two major scenarios for aspiring interns right now:
- Those who had secured their summer internships but were not able to join: As many of the companies cancelled their internship programmes, many students lost their internship opportunities. Here, an important thing to understand is that these are testing times and the students will have to adapt their strategies as per the current situation. Students facing this situation can try to speak with their recruiter and understand if the internship could be turned into a virtual working opportunity. They can make their case in front of the employer as to how their internships can be altered into virtual opportunities and state their competence to work virtually.
If this isn’t possible for any reason, these candidates also involuntarily fall into the second category. Let’s talk about that now.
- Those who were planning to find and pursue internships in the summer season: On one hand, businesses are not hiring and onboarding new interns right now, while on the other, many businesses have switched to remote working. They are now hiring and mentoring their interns virtually. Now, it can be extremely difficult for the students to keep a track of organisations that are currently hiring. Here, the best bet they have is by finding internships through online portals where they can conveniently find relevant work-from-home internships and apply to them.
Some of the popular work-from-home internship profiles available for students from various backgrounds are as follows:
- Engineering students — Popular internship profiles include web development, programming, machine learning, data science, data analytics, and Python development.
- Degree (BSc, BA, Bcom) students — Popular internship profiles include content writing, social media marketing, teaching, business development, marketing and operations.
- Management students — Popular internship profiles include business development, marketing, digital marketing, human resources, operations and finance.
Another important thing to understand is that with the continuously changing circumstances in the COVID-19 era, the competition to grab the best of internships has also increased exponentially. This makes it extremely necessary for candidates to work harder on their internship applications and make their candidature stand out. Here are a few things they could do for the same:
- Customise their resume and application according to the organisation and the internship: Customisation stands true for applying to internships and jobs irrespective of any situation. A custom resume and application represents the sincerity and job fitness of the aspiring candidate. A student can customise her application by highlighting relevant skills, projects, and experiencing for the internship of interest.
- Highlight their competence to work virtually: To work remotely, one must possess skills like high ownership and adaptability. In addition to this, they must have a good sense of time management. The candidate must highlight these skills with relevant examples to establish their competence for the virtual internship. In addition to this, they must also cite an example of hard work from their previous internship, a college project, or participation in any competition or event.
- Get acquainted with relevant tools: In order to navigate a work-from-home internship, it is necessary that a candidate is well-acquainted with tools like Trello, Teamwork, Google Drive, Dropbox, Skype, Google Hangouts Meet, Slack, Team Viewer, and Zoom. These tools help one in managing their work and coordinate with the team.
About the Author: Sarvesh Agrawal is the founder and CEO of Internshala, an internship and training platform (internshala.com).