Both internships and externships serve as a short-term learning experience most commonly used by students or young professionals stepping into the workforce. Internships are hands-on learning, doing tasks and completing problems, while externships consist of shadowing experienced professionals in the workplace. Both these opportunities can be helpful to not only the students gaining experience but also the employers who use them.
Internships are a great way to get a foot in the door of professional work. They provide opportunities to gain real-life experience and often lead to more career opportunities. Internships are a way to put classroom knowledge to work in real time, helping students better expand their understanding of what they have learned. Making those connections and learning how to problem solve helps students go the extra mile in their studies, as well as prepare them for their future careers.
Creating internship programs in your business not only benefits the next generation of workers, but also strengthens your employees and hiring processes. Internship programs create a strong hiring pipeline. Since you have taken the time to train them and helped give them a foundation of skills, they make the perfect candidates for jobs you might offer. You are able to evaluate in real time their skills and abilities while they are interns. Interns are also able to improve your current employees’ workload and efficiency. Interns are often given basic tasks to complete to help them learn about the industry, and this lets your full-time employees focus on more important work.
In comparison to the in-depth and hands-on work internships offer, externships are a more informal, less involved option. Externships often consist of a shadowing program where students and young people can follow the day of an experienced professional. They are focused on learning through watching; through this experience, employers are showing externs how to do the day-to-day of a job and letting them absorb the responsibility and workload there is to take on. Externships are a great way to better understand potential industries and businesses to work in. It is a way to keep learning outside the physical classroom. Since externships are less formal than an internship, they can last anywhere from one day to a few weeks. This gives employers a lot of flexibility to decide when and where they want to implement this opportunity.
Externships have many of the same benefits to employers that internships provide, including being able to see a pool of interested potential candidates for hiring and getting to know a little about their skills and experience outside an interview setting. While externships often happen over a shorter period of time, they still provide a way for employees to showcase their experience and give back to their community of young professionals. This creates a positive environment that students feel welcome in, bolstering excitement and enthusiasm about your business.
Internships and externships are both avenues to gain valuable professional experiences, as well as grow businesses and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with the new generation of workers. These kinds of programs are crucial to helping educate and prepare students for the workforce. They are also opportunities to increase workplace efficiency and recruiting efforts.
