Summer break for college students has finally arrived. They have plans to spend time at the beach, lake, or music festivals. Relaxation is important, but they may not realize that there are hidden costs if they don’t use this time to complete an internship before they graduate.
The costs are in the form of career potential, earnings, and time. All of these are important, but which are most significant to a new graduate?
Inability to Compete with Other Graduates
As students don their black robes and graduation caps this spring, they’ll enter a competitive pool of job seekers. Do you know how you stack up against your peers?
In 2014, 75% of graduates left school with at least one internship completed. Further, employers are now looking for work experience above other factors in selecting entry-level candidates.
It comes back to the all-too-painful chicken and egg reality most millennials have faced. They are told they need experience to get a job, but they need a job to get experience.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education and the American Public Media’s Marketplace survey, internship experience is the single most important credential for recent graduates to have on their resume in their job search.
Adding an internship to your resume before you hit the real world will at least keep you on pace with your peers, if not give you an edge.
Lose Out on ‘Foot in the Door’ Opportunities
Most job seekers are familiar with online job submissions being referred to as the “black hole” where their resume disappears, never to be found again.
One of the ways to get a foot in the door to your first job is to find an internship at a company that regularly hires their interns as full-time employees.
In 2015, the conversation rate of interns becoming full-time employees was 51.7%, according to the NACE Internship & Co-op Survey Report. Further, those that interned for the same company more than once increased the likelihood that they would receive a full-time employment offer.
Lack Relevant Experience to Negotiate First Salary
The lack of experience needed to negotiate your first salary can be the greatest financial cost of not having an internship under your belt before you graduate.
A survey by NerdWallet revealed that 62% of grads don’t negotiate their first salary. Worse yet, 74% of employers had room to increase the first offer by 5-10% during negotiations.
“If you open the negotiation with a suggestion of $50k, but your employer was willing to pay you $60k, you may have to settle for less than you could have made," notes Kelly Mattice, vice president at recruitment firm The Execu Search Group in New York City.
Many of these new graduates don’t think they have enough experience to negotiate. Relevant internship experience can give the added confidence needed to step up to the plate and ask for more.
That $10k difference you lose out on when you don’t have negotiating power stings as a 22 year-old. However, it hurts worse when you consider the thousands of dollars you lose when factoring in raises over time.
Miss out on networking contacts
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Yale University, 70% of all jobs are found through networking.
While networking through your college can be useful, especially when you target alumni, nothing beats showing somebody your work ethic. Working at an internship allows your colleagues to speak about your working abilities from experience.
Many colleagues or intern managers are very willing to connect interns with industry contacts when they don’t have any in-house opportunities for full-time employment.
Networking through internships can open up that 70% of job opportunities to you.
Wasting Years in the Wrong Job
This probably won’t apply to the millennial who chose the perfect college major, which will lead to the perfect job that they will love forever and ever.
For the rest of you, this may be one of the most important prices you will pay for not interning. Mercer’s “What’s Working” survey, conducted in 2015, found that 44% of 18-34 year-olds are seriously considering leaving their organization. Meaning, a good portion of new graduates are not happy in their first job.
Quarter-life crisis is becoming a household phrase for millennials. Dissatisfaction with awful first jobs is often to blame.
It looks something like this. A new graduate can’t wait to start their first job because they had so much fun learning about their particular degree. They start that job and find themselves staring at a cube wall for eight hours a day, listening to older colleagues complain about their fate and count down the days until retirement.
Internship experience can help millennials determine if they really want to go into the field they’ve chosen. Figuring out you hate a particular job as an intern has a much lower cost than when you have started full-time employment and have student loan bills knocking down your door.
Time is a valuable resource to young adults. Don’t waste it by waiting for a full-time job to figure out what kind of work you are wired for.