2 The pros of a virtual internship
An attractive element of the virtual internship is its potential for flexibility and part-time commitment, allowing you to fit it in alongside other activities or responsibilities.
It offers the opportunity for international work experience but can also allow you to work for employers elsewhere in your home country that might not be easily accessible to you. This gives you a much broader range of potential employers to target.
The information you covered in Weeks 4 and 5 about finding and securing work experience is equally applicable here, but you might find that the recruitment processes used are more likely to be online, e.g. video interviews.
Other key advantages include the opportunity to develop and enhance your experience of remote working. According to Merchant Savvy (2020) ‘across the globe, working from home and remote locations has grown 159% since 2005, more than 11x faster than the rest of the workforce’. This trend is predicted to continue, so experience of working in this way will be advantageous.
The development of digital skills that a virtual internship encourages will also bring benefits and increase your future employability. Microsoft (no date) suggests that ‘within the next two decades, 90% of jobs will require some level of digital proficiency’, despite Lloyds Bank (2019) stating that ‘more than half of UK employees (53%) do not have the digital skills needed for work’.
Open University student and Online Marketing and Public Relations Intern, Lily Beach, says about her internship:
The internship at Nubis Aviation Training has developed my business, digital marketing and written skills. It has been great to work and collaborate with a small team and take on responsibility for developing an area of the company.
Virtual internships provide benefits not just for you as an employee but also for employers. You’ll consider what these benefits are in Activity 1.
Activity 1 Why do employers use virtual internships?
Think about the potential benefits for an employer in recruiting a virtual intern and make a note of your ideas in the box below.
Discussion
You could have listed several potential benefits, including:
- the ability to recruit from a much larger pool of candidates, extending far beyond their local area and including those who need to have flexible working hours
- as students can potentially do a virtual internship alongside their studies, employers have greater access to new talent all year round rather than having to wait for the traditional summer holiday period
- reduced costs in terms of providing a workspace and equipment etc. for the intern
- flexibility in recruiting an intern for a particular project.
Now watch this clip of employers explaining the value of virtual internships to them.
Transcript: Video 2
[TEXT ON SCREEN: Why a virtual internship?]
[TEXT ON SCREEN: Would you recommend virtual interns?]