5 ways to find a paid internship during the COVID-19 pandemic

We’ve written extensively about how unpaid internships are generally illegal and the importance of students successfully completing at least one paid internship prior to graduation. Thanks to a year that most would prefer to forget, we should also look at how students can find a paid internship despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike almost every other industrialized country, the U.S. never got the pandemic under control. As a result, employers began to layoff millions of employees starting in March and, sadly, there’s just no end in sight. About half of the lost jobs have been replaced by new jobs, but the new jobs tend to be part- instead of full-time, pay far less per hour, require little to no skill, offer little to no job security, and not be career-related for the vast majority of those who are applying and even are being hired.

Fortunately, a relatively small percentage of internships were canceled during the peak summer season and those which were canceled tended to be those requiring the student to do the work on-site, such as in factories. Internships which were to be conducted in offices tended to be adapted so the interns could do the work remotely from home.

Looking ahead to 2021, we expect that it will again be true that large employers will employ most college students and recent graduates, whether those roles are part-time, seasonal, internship, or entry-level jobs.

Putting all of that together, we recommend that students searching for internships during this pandemic do the following:

1. Create your own virtual internship instead of waiting around for the employers you’re targeting to do so. We expect most office-related internships to again be remote (virtual) next summer, but if you line up one now then you won’t have to worry about whether your employer will allow you to work remotely next summer or risk your internship being revoked because the employer is unable or unwilling to allow you to work remotely.
2. Try project-based work, which some call micro-internships. Few employers care whether the job you held was technically an internship or not. What they care about is whether you can get the work done. An internship makes it easy for you to demonstrate your ability to do the work, but so does the successful completion of a related project. The leader in this field is Parker Dewey.
3. Narrow your list of employers you’re targeting in part by making sure that they’re hiring paid internships. An easy way to do this is to search for paid internships on job search sites like College Recruiter.
4. Be more flexible by adding roles or industries to your job search that you may not have considered when the job market was hot a year ago. We recommend that all candidates write down all of their competencies, interests, values, and needed compensation on a legal pad and then look for commonalities. Those commonalities should point you toward roles and industries that you may not have previously considered.
5. Invest in your skills today in order to increase the chances of being hired tomorrow. You may be pursuing a degree now and that’s great. Education is always a good thing. But consider short-term courses that offer certifications that employers value. One of College Recruiter’s partners, Google, recently rolled out free Google Career Certificates. Putting yourself in the shoes of an employer, if two candidates with similar educational backgrounds and work experiences applied to your job but one had a certification that demonstrated they could do the work you’re hiring for, which would you hire?