Internships: How to Turn Your Job into an Internship

In our last blogpost about internships, we talked about how to find an internship. For high school or college students who already have a job, there is an opportunity to turn your job into an internship. It is important to understand that supervisors and bosses love talking about their jobs and how they make their businesses work.

Internships are important because they provide an opportunity to learn and develop a skill that may become a future career.Internships can be formal or informal and paid or unpaid. In applying for future colleges or jobs, listing internships adds more depth to a resume.

Many college or high school students who already have jobs can easily turn a job into an internship. Again, to be clear, an internship is more than just a job – it is something that provides you with knowledge and career skills. It provides an opportunity to look at a career from an academic perspective while a job is generally about working for money.

What if you already have a job?

Expand your job to include the ideas about an internship. If you are working for someone, then it is a perfect opportunity to find out about your future career ideas.  Ask your supervisor if you can talk with him/her about the areas of future career areas.

For example, if you have a job in a coffee shop as a server but you are interested in a career in public relations, then talk to your supervisor about who you might talk to about how public relations is handled in this business. Find out if perhaps you might assist in some public relations activities for the company you work for. It could be posting on Facebook or Twitter on behalf of your company or business.

Another example might be that you have a job as a tutor working with other students at school. The parents of the students that you tutor may be involved in a career that may be of interest to you. Take the time to find out about the parents of the students you tutor to find out how you might network with the parents for an internship in addition to the tutoring job.

To recap, whatever job you have, be sure and do the following:

• Talk with your supervisor or the boss to learn about how the company runs.
• Identify the types of skills that you might learn about
• Think about how you might volunteer at your current place of employment to learn more about your career interests