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There are numerous ways to start a career. Entry-level job, internships, and freelancing are few of those ways that push-starts a career. I decided to start learning attributes and my career with internships.
Though I wasn’t much fond of internships. However, during my senior year at Paramount California University, I registered for a career management course that taught me about the best job hunting techniques and how to approach companies for internships. I started to implement my learning from this course which resulted in developing my interest for internships. I was amazed to see the response of companies when I used my career management course learning for job hunting. I was able to work as a social media intern in two different companies. My internship experiences polished my knowledge, skills, and abilities in the field of social media marketing and taught me valuable lessons that helped me land my first full-time job.
During my career management course, I realized that there are many students who just don’t value internships but factually internships are the best the way to obtain valuable experience that assists you all over career. My intern experience set a direction, a route which helped me set my career goals and objectives. Luckily, the person I was reporting to during internship has been where I was, thereby he showed me what I required to design a direction for my career to lead it to the best possible destination.
Now that I have started my first full-time job, I would like to share 5 attributes that I learned from internships.
1. Expertise
Of course, the primary thing that I learnt from my internships was the expertise or skills required to complete tasks in the field. As I decided to go for social media marketing, my internships provided me with skills and expertise to run social media for a business. Though I was aware of using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and all on personal level, the way business start their campaigns was different, unique and very interesting. During the brainstorming sessions of those internships where every department of the company was present, I understood the idea of aligning brand story, mission, and vision of business with every social media post or campaign that you run for business. My internship experienced developed skills and expertise that are required for social media marketing.
2. Working as a team
Let’s take football as an example; a team cannot win if the individual performances are good but teamwork is poor. Similarly, business cannot achieve their goals and targets if the teamwork is missing. My internship experiences made me realize the importance of teamwork. I had to coordinate with graphics team, content team, and managers before posting on social media to gain followers and increase engagement rate for the business. The social media posts where everybody was on the same page resulted in better results compared to those where teamwork was not up to mark. Hence, the experience taught me the importance of teamwork and its impact on department and companies’ success.
3. Independence
There is a myth that interns are usually spoon-fed about everything and they are not allowed to do anything on their own. During my second internship, I was given the complete ownership of social media channels of the business. I had to start everything from the scratch. This is where my ability to take decisions independently was polished. This attribute is very important in the professional world.
4. Believe in yourself
Working as an intern and completing imperative tasks for my departments and companies gave me confidence to believe in myself. Believing yourself is not only vital to your success but it also helps you feel much more competent and confident in every task you do.
5. Sense of accomplishment
Once I settled into my internships, I started to complete tasks, projects and even created social media campaigns for my business. The completion of these tasks and assignments created a sense of accomplishment or something that I took pride in. Moreover, when my social media posts used to get retweets or likes, I used to feel proud of it and it was also appreciated by the management. The ability to take pride in your work is very important for career growth.
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