Hiring freezes and budget cuts have led to a somewhat muted, cautious approach to hiring interns this summer. That’s unfortunate, because both sides—employer and talent—need these tryouts with each other more than ever.
I’ve been an intern a half-dozen times in my career, and supervised interns countless more. Internships are a lower-stakes way to understand different aspects of jobs and industries, but also to learn the ways of work, from what time people show up to how they show up. What do employees wear? What work gets priority? How do you banter about, well, nothing at the start of a meeting? For bosses, interns are a constant reminder of not just where we’ve come from, but where we are going—this talent pool offers exposure to new ways of working, training, consuming, and engaging.
But in this moment of economic upheaval, internships and entry-level roles aren’t just harder to find; the rules for how to succeed in them are murky, too.
Take an uncertain job market and add in questions about hybrid work, whether a college degree is even needed anymore, flatter hierarchies and intergenerational conflict, and whether artificial intelligence will make our jobs obsolete anyway, and you start to feel the plight of the summer intern (and their supervisor) right now.
With an eye toward this uncertainty, I asked a half-dozen professionals to offer some guidance and advice with an eye toward what interns and employers actually can control in this moment of uncertainty.
Read more here: https://time.com/charter/6281884/6-rules-for-a-successful-internship-in-an-uncertain-moment/
